Darkness Over Love by Paul Monk

Paul Monk, the author of Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty and The West in a Nutshell, is writing again. Darkness over Love is his most ambitious project to date and will, with the earlier two works published by Barrallier Books, form a stunning trilogy on love and civilization. Paul describes the forthcoming work this way:

 Darkness Over Love explores what it means to love another human being. More challengingly, it explores what it takes to establish and sustain intimacy with another; not in an imaginary world but in the world as find it. That world is, in many ways, a world of darkness: the darkness of ignorance, violence, mortality, solitude. Human beings exist in this world, often oblivious to or willfully ignoring much of this, if only to keep the darkness out. But what if one doesn't shut it out? What if one takes on the world? How, then, does love flourish? 

A worldly and tender narrator takes the reader on an odyssey through the darkness of the world in reflections directly addressed to his muse. This is not a mere imitation of the classic Odyssey of Homer, nor a simple tale for our times. Rather, it is a journey engaged with the very nature of life on Earth, both biologically and existentially, politically and morally. The narrator discloses the manifold ways in which he and all of us are part of a tale that goes back to the very emergence of life on Earth and how extraordinarily rich that tale is once you realize you are part of it.

You will find yourself in cities on every continent, from Budapest and Vienna to Mexico City and New York; and led through the riches and terrors of thousands of years ancient Egypt and ancient Greece to ancient America and ancient China, at every point brought alive by poetry and song . The world of Odysseus was small and tame compared with what you will find in Darkness Over Love. The layers of meaning in it throw light into the very depths of what it means to be human and the ending will be an epiphany of a particularly original and poetic kind.