Ghost Confessions by John Shirley
Jackanapes Press (November 2025)
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
John Shirley has written novels, short stories, TV scripts, screenplays, song lyrics, poetry, and various forms of nonfiction. His books number more than eighty, including numerous novels of sf, dark fantasy, horror, thrillers, and westerns, and twelve short story collections. He has won the Bram Stoker Award for his collection: Black Butterflies: A Flock on the Dark Side, and the Spur Award for his Western Gunmetal Mountain. He has also written one non-fiction book, Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas. As a musician, Shirley has fronted his own bands and written lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult and others. His newest collection of poetry and song lyrics is Ghost Confessions.
John Shirley opens his book with an introduction to his views and philosophies on poetry. As primarily a lyricist, it should be no surprise for readers that Shirley leans towards narrative, rhymed poetry. He mentions influences as wide as Tim Powers, The New Formalist movement, Richard Wilbur, and A. E. Stallings. Many of the pieces in this collection are, in fact, described as song lyrics, so the rhymed lyricism in the rest of the poetry shouldn’t be surprising. Take, for example, the opening lines of “Who Plays the Music for the Dance of Chaos:”
Sometimes all seems random
(Though laboring in tandem
with meshing parts per law)
I’m never sure what vehicles I saw
But I’m sure no human manned them
could easily be put to music. However, read as a poem, they create a propulsion forward for the reader, one which mirrors the speaker’s need to escape the titular dance. This sort of poetry, paralleled against song lyrics, explores Shirley’s versatility as a poet.
Furthermore, certain poems in this collection show Shirley’s attempts at a more open line. “I am Electricity” gently approaching free verse, but with an underlying dimiter and occasional gentle end rhyme to keep things formal:
Pressed my ear
to a live wire
and heard the current
sing its songNot quite sure
I got it right
But it’s never wrong“I…
Am…
ElectricityI…
Am…
The mind of machinery
While this sort of writing could easily be the lyrics of a hair metal power ballad, as an approach to clausal free verse, it works within this collection.
John Shirley’s main writing style is not poetry, and his biography and bibliography is clear evidence of that; furthermore, only a few of the poems in this collection have been previously published in journals. Ghost Confessions by John Shirley stands out as an achievement then, showcasing what is obviously an ignored voice in horror poetry, and any reader of horror poetry, especially rhymed lyric poetry, will want this book on their shelf.
