Gratitude!

I'm still in house quarantine after returning from North Carolina (the state now has a shorter and more lenient version, but I don't qualify for that, having left under the old rules), so my life has not been too exciting of late. However, I'm expecting something wonderful about my books at the online Easton Book Festival, I have some other e-events coming up, I have a long interview coming out soon, and I'm about to meet up with the Cathedral Arts committee in Albany in a few minutes.

And I'd like to share a link to this just-out review of Charis in the World of Wonders by Jane Greer. While the review has been shared and re-shared on social media, I am hoping it gets a little more attention through the blog. I could not be more grateful for her remarkably strong review. Please read and pass on to readers you think might be interested. I would be glad of that at any time but especially glad in this year of pandemic book launches.

Sample clip:

The book invites comparison with other works, such as The Odyssey (arduous homecoming after war), The Book of Job (wretched loss without lost faith), and Cinderella (good prevailing over evil). It has aspects of all these classics. Charis faces nearly insurmountable issues but perseveres. She is heroic inside and out.

The novel’s compelling plot, realistic characters, gentle humor, and historicity are strengths, but the first attraction is its glorious prose. Reviewers—there have been a few—can’t resist quoting the book’s opening paragraph. Someday it may be as well-known as the first lines of A Tale of Two Cities or Anna Karenina.

New reading, new poems--

POETRY, MOSTLY

I've been down in Carolina for some weeks, and of course I did not bring enough books with me (because who can bring enough?), even though there are books here as well, and I somehow tumbled into the lovely Harry Alter Books while my mother was at PT and came out with a Modern Library Pound Poems and Translations, some Horace odes, a pretty Petrarch collection, and Rupert Brooke. This plunge into book-greed happened despite the fact that I toted plenty of books with me, including the new Sally Thomas and Jane Greer collections (if you didn't see our three-way reading, it's mostly--minus a bit of techno-slip--on my Charis in the World of Wonders page, near the end. Jane reads from Love Like a Conflagration and Sally from Motherland.)

The reason I succumbed to another Pound collection was that I had the yen to read him while reading Timothy Steele's interesting nonfiction book, Missing Measures. Having a memory like a sieve, I did not recall--or else Steele has been an indefatigable hunter--so many expressions of uncertainty about vers libre from Pound, Eliot, and Williams. I'm afraid I laughed at Eliot's dismay when his niece sends him some of her school-assigned homework: free verse poems. What you and the public schools have unleashed on us, Thomas Stearns! A Niagara of poems... Steele talks at length about the disappointment of all three with what was accomplished, and how no hoped-for new metric emerges from Modernism and why that might be. It's a fascinating book that zooms back to the classical world to show the roots of free verse, and how various ideas pertaining to prose writing and poetry writing become braided, swapped, or muddled along the way. It's a useful book for any young poet, I would think, and might just convince one of the need to return to roots, or at least examine them.

A FEW POEMS JUST OUT AND ONLINE

"An Apple Tree Carol"

at 

Ekstasis

and

"The Little Place"
at
North American Anglican

(Click on my name for lots more.)

and some

at 

"Reverie,"

"Silk," 

and

"Metamorphoses." 

So that's 3 poems at Patrick Key's new Grand Little Things.

DR. JOHNSON

Versification, or the art of modulating his numbers, is indispensably necessary to a poet. Every other power by which the understanding is enlightened or the imagination enchanted may be exercised in prose. But the poet has this peculiar  superiority, that to all the powers  which  the perfection of every other composition can require  he adds the faculty of  joining music with reasons, and of acting at once upon the senses  and the passions.

If you missed our video...

If you were cast into woe by missing the Greer - Thomas - Youmans reading, here it is. I couldn't get youtube to accept an image of all three of us; we are too complex for youtube, it seems! So apologies that it's just my cover as thumbnail.

Jane Greer - Love like a Conflagration 

Sally Thomas - Motherland 

Marly Youmans - Charis in the World of Wonders

12 June 2020
via Zoom

ZOOMFEST!

You are invited

to a

Pandemic Book Party

Jane Greer, Sally Thomas, Marly Youmans

reading from their new books:

two poetry collections and a novel.

Live

on

Friday, June 12

North America: 

3:00 Eastern, 

2:00 Central, 

1:00 Mountain, 

noon Pacific.

World time zone converter HERE.

Register in advance 

HERE. 

Jane Greer,

Love Like a Conflagration

Jane Greer founded Plains Poetry Journal, a literary magazine that was an advance guard of the New Formalism movement, in 1981, and edited it until 1993. Her poetry collections include Bathsheba on the Third Day (1986) and Love like a Conflagration (2020).

For  more about Jane, hop HERE

Buy her book via indies, Lambing Press, Amazon, Bookshop, and more...

Sally Thomas,

Motherland

Sally Thomas is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Fallen Water (2015) and Richeldis of Walsingham (2016), both from Finishing Line Press. Her full-length poetry book, Motherland, was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award, and is available now from Able Muse Press.

For Motherland news at Sally's site, skip over to HERE

Buy her book via indies, Able Muse, Amazon, Bookshop, and more...

Marly Youmans,

Charis in the World of Wonders

Author of fifteen books of poetry and fiction, including The Book of the Red King (Phoenicia Publishing, 2019) and Charis in the World of Wonders (Ignatius Press, 2020.)

For reviews, purchase venues, blurbs, etc., jump HERE