Wiseblood, Seren, poems

1,

From the Wiseblood Books End-of-2022 newsletter:

Seren of the Wildwood, a long fantasy story in verse by Marly Youmans, forthcoming in March of 2023. Youmans is an award-winning author of over fifteen books, including, most recently, Charis in the World of Wonders. Appreciating the way in which Seren "whispers to our fractured souls," Makoto Fujimura calls the poem "an adventure that is at once psychologically potent and fantastical," and Amit Majmudar illumines that Youmans, by "hybridizing the 'bob and wheel' of medieval poetry with the iambic pentameter narratives of the Romantic and Victorian era, conjures a time-frame outside time, perfectly suited to the story. This book is itself a 'Wildwood' where fey, elusive, illusory phenomena draw the protagonist—and the reader—deeper and deeper into mystery.” Seren will contain cover and interior illustrations by the Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins, including these three here (click on the images):

To see the images and read the entire and very interesting newsletter, go HERE.

2.

Out-in-December poems 

I've been forgetting to post poems on the blog, as more people tend to read them via links on twitter or facebook these days, but here are the out-in-December ones I can remember (alas, I've had to rush away from home and don't have access to all my records.)

New poem in First Things: The Mortal Longing After Loveliness This one not "about" but is oddly apt for the Christmas season. I wonder how many poems Xerxes has marched into...

New poem in Willows Wept: Summer's End (page 53) I'd forgotten this one; poets are moody, it seems!

And if you have a subscription to print-only journal Blue Unicorn (they're very rare, those lovely, melancholy blue ones), you'll find one in there this month as well, thanks to a bit of delay on an issue.

3.

A new page 

is up for Seren of the Wildwood, so check it out! See tabs above. Blurbs-in-full plus more of those ever-delightful Hicks-Jenkins illuminations...

This snowy, icy week...

A few warm things... 

Charis in the World of Wonders

I've updated the Charis page, so please take a look--there is a great deal there now. This week I'm glad of a lovely long review of Charis in the World of Wonders by notable musician, teacher, and editor Lorraine Hale Robinson. And it's hosted at North Carolina Literary Review, edited by Margaret Bauer. To have four thoughtful pages in NCLR is something for which I am grateful! 

You may find the digital version of the magazine HERE, or you may leap directly to the review HERE.

     Charis in the World of Wonders offers diverse sources of enjoyment—an exciting adventure saga, for example. Or, readers interested in the philosophical concepts of time and place, tracing the path of Charis’s adventure offers attractions. For readers interested in history, the book presents a vivid and engaging picture of “a world lit by fire.” Or for those of a metaphysical bent, there is the fascination of the bewildering “forests” of contradictions that drive Every Woman Charis’s interior, psychological journeys. For readers who relish the mot juste, there is delicate and nuanced writing craft and a sparkling use of kennings. My own recommendation is to read the book for all of its many wonders. --Lorraine Hale Robinson, “Homage to Hawthorne: A (New) Wonder Book,” North Carolina Literary Review, pp. 124-127. 11 February 2021.

The Dreamer as Architect

And HERE is "The Dreamer as Architect" at the digital version of First Things...  The second of two poems chosen by poet A. M. Juster in his brief time as poetry editor there, so I thank him. This one has received loads of lovely comments on twitter and facebook, so if you have not already seen it, perhaps you might like to peregrinate over that way... It's dedicated to novelist Midori Snyder.

The start of  the poem, for a taste:

                                              Last night in dreams, she lived a thousand years

                                              And was the architect who made a house

                                              That wandered from the mountains to the sea.

Hope you had a wonderful Valentine's Day, passers-by! 

And now Charis rejoices...

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY
Saw a St. Valentine in a glass coffin last year in Stephansdom in Vienna.
He had the fanciest curled-toed shoes!

Medieval images of love 

at medievalists. net

UPDATED CHARIS PAGE

Releasing pre-publication comments from Makoto Fujimura, John Wilson, Augustine Wetta, Emily Barton, and Fiorella De Maria (novelists/painter-writer/editor), together with the flap copy book description and a note from Clive Hicks-Jenkins on the updated page for my wild Puritan adventure, Charis in the World of Wonders, out in March from Ignatius. 

MORE PRAISE FOR CHARIS

The ever-thoughtful John Wilson has a new essay up at First Things, and it includes lovely comments on Charis in the World of Wonders. And he calls my illuminator "the incomparable Clive Hicks-Jenkins." I may have to call him Clive the Incomparable from now on...

You may read the whole essay, "Desiderata," at First Things, and here is the much-to-be-desired Marly-and-Clive paragraph for your perusal:

A writer I greatly admire and have sometimes written about, Marly Youmans, has a new book coming late in March from Ignatius Press: Charis in the World of Wonders, with cover art and illustrations by the incomparable Clive Hicks-Jenkins. This novel, set in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, should occasion a piece that tackles the whole sweep of Youmans’s work. She’s not part of any fashionable faction, and much as I would be delighted and surprised to see it receive generous attention in the New York Times Book Review and other such outlets, I am mainly hoping that First Things, Commonweal, Image, and other kindred publications will not let this opportunity pass.

The morning began with icefall that has coated every twig, needle, and leaf of summer. And it has continued onto a remarkably thick and beautiful snowfall. But such encouragement makes me feel warm and cosy...

John Wilson's Year of Reading 2019

The Book of the Red King is on John Wilson's booklist at First Things. Hurrah! There's a good bit of poetry on the list, including new books by Jennifer Reeser (a poet I met long ago at the Westchester poetry conference), Aaron Belz, the late Brett Foster, Diane Glancy, Laurance Wieder, and Jane Tyson Clement, who died in 2000. And more in other genres...

Maze of Blood at First Things

Having just fished a snow-laden contributor's copy of First Things out of the mailbox, I am pleased to find not only my review of A. M. Juster's St. Aldhelm's Riddles (thank you to Matthew Schmitz for asking), but also an appearance in the year's roundup of 2015. I'm very glad to be among the lucky few included in the essay.

Here's a look, for visitors who don't have a subscription. (The essay will probably up online later on, just as last year's was.) I should clarify that the reference to "who wasn't written for Marly or for me" is a glance back to prior paragraphs, where Claire Vaye Watkins is mentioned, along with her much-read (yes, I read it) essay in Tin House that stabs at a good many targets, especially "white male literati."

* * *

from John Wilson, "Books of 2015," First Things (March 2016)

Jacket art, Clive Hicks-Jenkins;
book design, Mary-Frances Glover Burt

      Marly Youmans's new novel, Maze of Blood, has an epigraph from Jorge Luis Borges (who wasn't writing for Marly or for me, but whose books I have read and reread over the years). It's taken from Borges's story "The Garden of the Forking Paths": I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars."
     I hate to give away too much and spoil someone's first reading, but here I will be violating that rule a bit. Maze of Blood is (among other things) a novel about the imagination--"about it" by enacting it. (Coleridge is a tutelary presence throughout.) The protagonist, Conall Weaver, is based on Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian. Youmans tells us that before the book begins. But it is not a novel "about" Howard. Rather, it takes his experience as a kind of template.
     Howard committed suicide at the age of thirty--stunning, if you consider what he'd already achieved. (Lots of writers today have published very little by the time they are thirty!) Conall Weaver also kills himself--very early in the book. This is a novel told in reverse chronology: In the last section, Conall is a young boy.
     By now, you may be shaking your head--what sort of book is this? "Experimental fiction"? Ugh. Actually, no--though it may not be your cup of tea in any case. If you are willing to trust the writer, you'll soon get the hang of it. Conall Weaver, like Robert E. Howard, grows up in hardscrabble Texas, a setting in which his writing seems out of place. But he's not just alienated from his setting (which he also loves); he feels at odds with his "time." As does Marly Youmans in her "time," which is ours as well. His stories are an act of rebellion and an act of celebration.
     But this isn't simply a Portrait of the Artist--for Artists (or would-be Artists) only. We are all characters in search of an Author, so the Spirit of Story tells Conall:

     For everything inside a story--and know most of all, that the world is a story and began with a word--is made up. And so the tale of a Green Knight with his chopped-off head still holding a knight of the Round Table to promises made is no less true than the tale of a man crammed with secrets who spontaneously combusts and leaves behind only a black, tallowy mark on the floorboards, and his story in turn is no less true than the tale of a Texas sharecropper's wife who has had a miscarriage only ten days before but just this morning was walking behind the mule and guiding the jerking plow.

Glimmery, etc.

First Things
John Wilson's article "Books of 2014" is now available on the website of print magazine First Things. If you are a novel-reading maniac and don't want to hear about beetles and more (me, I like beetles and desert fathers), scroll down to the letter C and you'll find six novels from 2014, including Glimmerglass.

Interview
And if you want more Glimmerglass, take a peek at the post just prior, with links to a multi-part interview with me, conducted by Suzanne Brazil and published in various places on the web. It's a painstaking interview, done over time, each question emerging out of prior conversation.

Mons Nubifer Sanctus workshop
If you're near the Catskills and want to sign up for a February workshop (analysis and writing) on scripture and language, related writing exercises, and poetry in beautiful Lake Delaware, take a look at Mons Nubifer Sanctus, Holy Cloud-Bearing Mountain, a center for contemplative life.

Glimmerglass at First Things

Clip from "Books of 2014: John Wilson takes us from beetles to the Desert Fathers," First Things, March 2015 (print), pp. 45-48--

Marly Youmans is a novelist and poet out of sync with the times but in tune with the ages. Glimmerglass is set in the present in a fictional village patterned on Cooperstown. It's a sweetly uncanny mix of the quotidian and the magical, a portrait of the artist (and this is such a refreshing change) as a middle-aged woman recovering her vocation. There's a very odd house, too, with Gothic chambers, and a family secret, and much more.