Metallurgy – Of Love and Death and Metal and a Playlist

As I wait for my books to be re-released via Brigids Gate Press (soon!), I have continued to work on my dark found poetry project, Metallurgy. This time, my source material has been the lyrics of many favourite metal tracks, interspersed with a few songs some might not think of as metal but which to me share many of the attributes of this genre.

Many thanks to Wayne Fenlon for supplying the base image for the front cover plus another image which included Baphomet. I adapted the latter into the back cover and did a lot of merging and cloning to hopefully give a seamless transition between the two. I do enjoy working on covers as I’m learning new skills all the time.

There are 100 poems – derived from 200 songs – in this collection and some are even shape poems. Getting the latter formatted correctly for an ebook takes some doing, I will tell you. The easiest way is actually to use text boxes and group them together, but some tweaking was still involved. For once creating the print copy for upload was a lot easier than the kindle.

Metallurgy also contains a bonus poem from the wonderful Cindy O’Quinn. A Bram Stoker nominated writer, she has contributed her own found poem, Invitation to a Concert – A Heavy Metal Introduction, sourced from Time of the Season by the Zombies and Overdose by AC/DC. This poem is the intro to my ‘concert’. Whilst my collection focusses on the heavier side of metal, I have deliberately left the more classic rock out as Cindy has been playing in that particular playground on and off.

At the back of the book, I have compiled two indexes. One which lists the bands and their associated tracks, another which lists the poems and their associated bands. I have made this clickable for the ebook.

All poems are completely original. I do not subscribe to any form of plagiarism and I certainly don’t want big record companies chasing me! However, as is the way with found work, it is the norm to acknowledge the original source of inspiration, and I have done so for each poem. This is an homage after all!

I hope to be able to share pre-order links in the not too distant future. The project is almost ready. In the meantime, here is the playlist for the book. One or two tracks weren’t available on Spotify and one track has a different artist, though it is an associated band (Gorgoroth’s Sign of an Open Eye was only available on Spotify under God Seed that I could see).