The Red King's Friends

Please drop by the page for The Book of the Red King, now with additional new and enticing comments from novelist Scott G. F. Bailey, poet Ray Oliver, much-laureled poet and novelist Fred Chappell, poet Sally Thomas, poet Jeffery Beam, and poet and novelist Sebastian Doubinsky. The last of these posted a review on my birthday yesterday: lovely gift!

At right: a precious wentletrap by Clive Hicks-Jenkins... The Fool's beloved is the lunar lady, Precious Wentletrap.

Lady Word of Mouth returns...

Jeffery Beam is back up at Lady Word of Mouth with Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements! Based on art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins...

I'll be reading my friend Jeffery Beam's poem "An Invocation" (from Skysill Press's Gospel Earth) at 7:30 p.m., "Ensembles Large and Small from the Glimmerglass Festival Orchestra Cherry Valley Star Theatre: Artworks Concert Series August 12" and at "The Pierstown Grange Presents: The Annual Florence High Memorial Chamber Music Concert August 13, 7:30 pm Chamber Music presented by members of the Glimmerglass Festival Orchestra." 

Locals, get a little bit of North Carolina in your week--see y'all there!

Jeffery Beam, "Beyond the Green Door"

Jeffery Beam, reading and singing--listen up, world! In our culture, poets tend to be invisible, but here's a good look at Jeffery. Links below.



"This [3-part] reading offers a range of poetry, songs, and reflections from Jeffery Beam’s career – from the age of 17 to the present – as well as poems and songs from others, to illuminate his life-long conversation with the Divine in Nature. A troubadour poet, he is the author of over 20 works of poetry and sung poems in books and CDs, and is a photographer, editor, and critic. The reading was part of the Faith and the Arts series at St Matthews Episcopal Church, Hillsborough, North Carolina. Recorded October 18, 2015."

Four recent books by Beam at Lady Word of Mouth: http://ladywordofmouth.blogspot.com/…/four-recent-books-by-  Jeffery's website at UNC: http://www.unc.edu/~jeffbeam/ More poems by Jeffery, picked by former NC poet laureate, Kathryn Stripling Byer of Cullowhee, here: http://ncpoetlaureate.blogspot.com/…/poet-of-week-jeffery-b

Collaborations

Clive Hicks-Jenkins,
latest (4th of six) division page head for Maze of Blood.

Marly and Clive

Clive Hicks-Jenkins snipped comments from our letters to make this Artlog post (surprised me!) about the fourth head for Maze of Blood, the only one so far that has seemed to give him pause. He ended up using the gun sight as an eye. All the heads have an unusual eye--a beetle set sideways, a flower, a curl of mazy paper. Lots of thoughts, ending with responses from many people in the arts--writing, visual arts, music--about the final result.

And with Mr. Beam

This Artlog post is about a collaboration between two longtime friends of mine, Clive and North Carolina poet Jeffery Beam, who I have known even longer than I have known Clive. It also has some interesting comments about collaboration and about Maze of Blood, including the claim that "Marly takes even the most unnerving material and stitches in through with the sublime." Like that description.

Upcoming with Clive

Suzanne Brazil recently did a 2-part interview with me that ran at Blogcritics and at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. We're now plotting on a 3-way interview about collaboration--Suzanne, me, Clive. It'll be done the slow way, where Suzanne asks a question, one of us responds, and then the comment is sent on to the next person for a response. And so on, all organized and directed by Suzanne...

Publication day for Glimmerglass!

Comments and images

Full front quote:
I cannot recommend an author more 
than Marly Youmans, whose fantastic prose 
is absolutely gorgeous and haunting.
--Sébastien Doubinsky

Glimmerglass (Mercer, 9/2014),

Links: indies (search), online venues, and Mercer.

SIN: 0881464910 ISBN-13: 978-0881464917

Interior/exterior art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

a novelist

Glimmerglass is a series of mirrors and panes that splinter and soften to let you fall deeper into the heart of myth and artistic desire. A resonant, beautiful exploration of fragile hopes and the courage that comes from resisting their trampling by others.   

        --Margo Lanagan, author of Sea Hearts, Black Juice, and others; winner of World Fantasy and Printz awards

an editor

You might not even know what you are seeking, but once inside the pages of Glimmerglass, you’ll find exactly what you need: “a cup of music, a hill of sea.” In the Republic of Letters, Marly Youmans is our Magician in Chief.   

       --John Wilson, Editor, Books and Culture

Clive Hicks-Jenkins sketch for Glimmerglass

a poet

I know of no writers other than Marly Youmans who has the genius to combine the spine-tingling suspense of Gothic storytelling with the immense charm, grace, glamour, realism, and simplicity of Hawthorne. Glimmerglass does more than shimmer and grip; it entertains and hypnotizes. Youmans, one of the biggest secrets of contemporary American fiction, writes with freshness and beauty. Whether she’s writing historical fiction or fantasy, her characters leave one breathless. Her ability to describe a person, a place, or the psychological underpinnings of a plot or individual, ranks with the great novelists, the highest literature. A tale of love and intrigue, mystery and pathology, Glimmerglass’ appeal is the warmth and charge of a tale told round a fire fused by Hitchcockian anxiety, empathy, and relief. Nature, architecture, dread, thrill, sexual dilemma, and murder echo against Youmans’ gorgeous prose and terrifying romance, which glides like a serpent―without a single extraneous or boring word. Youmans is my favorite storyteller. I come back to her as if to a holy well.

       --Jeffery Beam, award-winning poet

         of The Broken Flower, Gospel Earth, and many more books

Marly YoumansGLIMMERGLASSSee On

pre-pub review

 This stylish contemporary variation on the Bluebeard legend from Youmans (A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage) serves up an appealing blend of myth, mystery, and magic... 

       --Publishers Weekly July 2014

JACKET COPY 

Perhaps it was a sense of estrangement from the everyday that drew Cynthia Sorrel to the village of Cooper Patent. The failed painter was lured by the gate house with its seven doors, the lake with its tower, and the magical air of a place that couldn’t quite decide whether it was fictional, mythic, or real. The gate house should have been a first clue that she was on a journey, and soon she begins to glimpse and then to pursue a figure in the woods near her house, convinced she has seen the Muse.  

As she reclaims her calling as a painter and moves deeper into the uncanny world of Cooper Patent, Cynthia is finds herself at the heart of a labyrinth of mystery. She will have to navigate its dream depths and secrets, brilliant or dark, locked behind a door that opens into the earth.  

Sébastien Doubinsky writes, “I cannot recommend an author more than Marly Youmans, whose fantastic prose is absolutely gorgeous and haunting.” Now this “best-kept secret among contemporary American writers” (Books and Culture) has scaled the tree of books and plucked twigs of gothic romance, ghost tale, medieval dream vision, and belated coming-of-age story, with a leaf or two from the novel of manners and fantasy. The transformed result,Glimmerglass, is a gift to literature like no other.

A step on the way...
On August 13th, the book arrived at the warehouse.
Prefer buying direct from the publisher?
"Call us and place an order, or order online 
(20% off discount code: Facebook). 
Toll free 1-866-895-1472 or locally 478-301-2880."

from "Letter from the Editor," 

Books and Culture Magazine, August 27, 2014

Speaking of superb novels, let me recommend two others that will be appearing not too long after you receive this issue. In September, Knopf will publish Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, which imagines the aftermath of a global pandemic of unprecedented ferocity. We follow a wandering troupe as they make their circuit in the upper Midwest, stopping at tiny settlements to perform Shakespeare and play music. In the same month, Mercer University Press will publish Marly Youmans' Glimmerglass, set in Cooper country in New York State, a book in which the fantastic and the quotidian are cunningly interlaced. These two novels have very little in common except for the quality of their imagination—but that is more than enough to make them kin.

A sample of the profuse interior decoration 
by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

A Clive-sketch for Glimmerglass!

A step on the way to the final jacket--soon the spine lettering 
would shrink a little, and other minor tinkering would happen.

And a larger version here.

detail of the jacket by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
book design by Burt and Burt
Mercer University Press, September 2014

A detail from the cover art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Mercer makes a postcard...

Lady Word of Mouth 

thanks you for noting the book's 

first day in the world.

Antique printer's flower
with harp to sing and wings to soar...

Upcoming events here

Glimmerglass coming near--

Glimmerglass, now in pre-order
Out in a week...
Interior vignette by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
More comments, art, etc. here

Jot of praise

I know of no writer other than Marly Youmans who has the genius to combine the spine-tingling suspense of Gothic storytelling with the immense charm, grace, glamour, realism, and simplicity of Hawthorne. Youmans, one of the biggest secrets of contemporary American fiction, writes with freshness and beauty. Her ability to describe a person, a place, or the psychological underpinnings of a plot or individual, ranks with the great novelists, the highest literature.

--excerpt from comments by poet Jeffery Beam

About the art

Glimmerglass is strewn throughout with descriptions of the flora and fauna of an observed landscape. But like the Arabian Nights storyteller, Marly spins tales within tales that access altogether more fabulous topographies, and it’s as though the sea-serpent door-knockers and griffin-embellished wrought-iron gates of the real world, have been markers of hidden realms paralleling the everyday. Bearing in mind I’m a man who reveres the great eighteenth century wood-engraver Thomas Bewick, it was a foregone conclusion that when I came to consider decorations for the chapter headings and tailpieces of this wonderful book, I’d be moved to create a miniature naturalis historia.

The images are collages pieced together from paper worked with brushes and paint, pen and ink, crayon and frottage. They reference the interior decorations made for Thaliad, though are simpler and bolder in design and execution. 

--Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Glimmerglass, the postcard--

Mercer sends me a present.

Postcard in the making, complete with one little error...

Metaphysical gold star if you find it!

Perfection still to come...

                      

Catalogue page for "Glimmerglass"--

Clive Hicks-Jenkins,
prefatory drawing for Glimmerglass

I'm posting the catalogue page for Glimmerglass today--go here.

"I know of no writers other than Marly Youmans who has the genius to combine the spine-tingling suspense of Gothic storytelling with the immense charm, grace, glamour, realism, and simplicity of Hawthorne. Glimmerglass does more than shimmer and grip; it entertains and hypnotizes. Youmans, one of the biggest secrets of contemporary American fiction, writes with freshness and beauty." -from poet Jeffery Beam's blurb

I'll be posting more comments and images as the summer goes on...

Beam on Glimmerglass

Clive!

5/15/14  New art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins up! (5/15)

5/14/14  I'm releasing all of Jeffery Beam's
long, marvelous blurb for Glimmerglass 
(Mercer University Press in September) here.

Cheered by Mr. Beam--
first time I have been compared
to a holy well!

The Glimmerglass News

Clive is busy transforming the world of Glimmerglass.

Clive Hicks-Jenkins + Glimmerglass

If you'd like to see how the cover is progressing, go here. That's the second peep at what Clive is doing with Glimmerglass, forthcoming from Mercer in 2014.

Me + Glimmerglass

The book has been sitting at the publisher's for a very long time, waiting its turn. And so I decided to tweak it once more and have promised to give it right back. So that is what I am doing, along with many other things that keep stopping me. But it'll be back in...

Others + Glimmerglass

As two people asked to read the book in manuscript, I asked them for blurbs. So that's poet Jeffery Beam and editor John Wilson. And I've also asked Margo Lanagan. Three just might be enough... I'll be posting them soon. Clive has already posted most of Jeffery's long comments here.

And other books

If you like the looks of this early progress, please take a look at some of the other books Clive and I have worked on. Most recently, that means two poetry books--Thaliad from Phoenicia and The Foliate Head from Stanza Press (UK.) The Throne of Psyche (Mercer) also has a Clive cover, as a detail from one of his paintings is the jacket and cover image. And as we set out with a new book, I don't want to forget my other recent paper children, particularly these three and the novel, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, also from Mercer (The Ferrol Sams Award; Silver Award, ForeWord Book of the Year Awards.) Please click on the tabs above for more information.

First peek at Glimmerglass!

You can jump here and look at the notebook of Clive Hicks-Jenkins, a once-blank region where he is now at work populating and decorating my novel Glimmerglass, forthcoming in 2014. Once again, as in Thaliad and The Foliate Head (see tabs above for news), we will have interior vignettes and a beautiful jacket, with immaculate design work done by the team of Burt and Burt for Mercer.

Clive has also let a stray proverbial cat out of its secret bag by including pieces of a blurb from poet Jeffery Beam... So there's an extra bit of fun.

Secrets! Magic! Transformation!

Mr. Common Sense: Well, of course it's a realist novel, isn't it? What's that dragon all about? And that thing without pants?

Miss Imagination: Yes, sure, call it realist. It's about a painter, isn't it? And in what we call the real world. And she begins to see . . .

Mr. Common Sense: No more cats out the bag! Tie that brown paper and calico up in string!

Miss Imagination: Okay, fine! Think you have it your way! But then again, there's no such thing as realism in stories. All paper realms are created second-hand out of words made of air and the stuff of creation, aren't they?

Me; that is, the one called Marly, who is only occasionally fictional: And I just might have borrowed a trick or two from the medieval world...

P. S. Notice that the first time in my life I have been compared to a holy well!

Last reading from A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage in North Carolina this year: 11:00 a.m. Saturday, May 26th, McIntyre's Books at Fearrington Village, Pittsboro.

Lovely evening last night with interesting Chapel Hillites, including friends in the realm of the arts--a poet, a writer, an artist. Collected the requisite mosquito bites in the garden and enjoyed good company and good paintings and good food. North Carolina is always a delightful place to tour for me!

Jeffery Beam on "A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage"

Reprinted from Facebook

By permission of poet Jeffery Beam.

I just completed my friend Marly Youmans’ latest novel. What I admire about her fiction in general is her ability to echo the Classics while spinning a good tale. She has a way with language which is literary but relaxed, delicate precision coupled with energizing plot ― the story always compels the reader along ― she writes the kind of book one dreams of ― her language beautiful, her sentences delicate but with just the right amount of ornate decoration creating a tension between reality and some other place in which I want to live.

Her characters are always flawed, always searching, and inevitably torn asunder by fateful circumstance. They are also believable, real, no matter how small a part they play in her tales. Marly’s best skill as a writer is to inhabit the interior of her characters through actual events, without having to explicitly relate psychological details. The characters are so much themselves that I feel I know them. That is a difficult accomplishment I think, and is made more amazing by Marly’s ability to create a character and stories that express spiritual or psychic revelations, soul-full discoveries, without feeling either cute or contrived, or New-Age or self-help. That’s what I’m getting at when I say she echoes the Classics.

In the greatest fictions characters, every bit real, also become emblematic or symbolic of each of us ― what was once called Everyman. Marly’s characters live and breathe; they walk not only the true story that is being told, but also the tale of a life, the trance on the path to becoming.

In A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Pip, our hero, begins his tale with the greatest trauma of his life ― one more but greater death than many he has already known at the small age of ten. He’s a small boy with a large mind ― teeming with tales from the English Civil Wars taken from one of his three favorite books (an orphan’s only possessions). He lives both inside a fantasy created from those stories while somehow understanding with precocious wisdom the burden of his orphan state and the Depression settling all around him. To escape his trauma he sets to the rails, a hobo savant of community and relationship.

A Death is not without suspense, tenderness, and gristle. Pip’s story is a coming of age one, no doubt, but with a difference. He will come to know not only what it is to be a man, and a survivor, but how to become an artist of life – as well as an inhabitant of his personal history and a discoverer of parts of himself, and revealer of the hidden but much-desired parts in others. You’ll really come to love Pip and like so many other Marly’s characters, Pip will never leave you.

Her work, I suspect, partly as a result of its tightrope walk between the contemporary and the archaic, is severely under-rated. She’s not only one of our best stylists, but a fabricator of superior stories told with a sense of fun, serious artistic finesse, and a determination to create works of lasting value available to readers of many ages.

Links for A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage Read chapter one at Scribd Book page See the new facebook page Goodreads giveway, April 15-May 15: 24 copies Amazon hardcover and ebook Indie bookstore search Buy direct from Mercer Also-- In celebration of the new book and National Poetry Month, Mercer is offering The Throne of Psyche at 20% off plus free shipping Discount code: POETRY

Jeffery Beam, "Gospel Earth"

Summer Swaps and Gifts, no. 1

Jeffery Beam is a poet worth knowing; I recommend this book and hope you will think about ordering it through your favorite bookshop. Poetry worth the reading needs the support of readers more than ever, and its faithful, dogged, heroic publishers need our dollars as well as our affection for poems.

Jacket painting by Laura Frankstone.

Hymn to the South
(from "Italian Scenes")

Pollarded arthritic trees
Olive & thyme clinging in the cliffs' clefts

"But more than even economy . . . is that way of giving his poems a deliberate & worldly strangeness. Each is an elegant reaching for subject." -Jim Cory

Aurelius says

Let the deity within you be the guardian of a living being
Red on the black gum leaves
Ants crawling on my neck skin tingling
Goldenrod's green gold river wind

". . . Simple purity, hymnal catching of delicate manifestations. I think it is high; & I think it is so American in the best sense." -Daphne Athas

Secret Gospel

The other world lord
with his rain buckets splashing
with his heart coming a wind
with his translucent looks ravishing
with his copper-ring circling his head
with one river rising
with one river emptying

He keeps turning round the certain mountains
Bringing me back
My seaweed skirt shivering emerald
So I can say the unsayable

To live is to sleep
Awakening the first longing
at dream's gate

"A collection to keep beside a bed. Where they might seep into the sleeping head like pearls. The white page a hand, the poems, tiny snail shells on the palm for scrutiny. Look even closer, they are even more exquisite." -Ippy Patterson

God Comes to See Me

God comes to see me
Without Bell

Never comes with Drum
But shakes the Footings

Of my House
With Subtle Water's roar

Listening at Crown of Day
When Nothing has been said

The Water take my Breath Away
The Landscape's recompense

"Jeffery Beam hovers around that legendary region of North Carolina that brings out hollerin', poets, real singers, & a certain fine strangeness. The poems come eerily out of gloom, sunlight splash, beast powers & something akin to spirituals." -Bob Arnold

Crucifix

Robin wrestles worm into a witch-hazel air
Suddenly air serene still as mother's milk

"I seed every breeze, sings the dandelion, sings every bright syllable in this Gospel Earth." -Thomas Meyer

William Morris'

hand in the weather
Acanthus leaves English oak leaves
Tongues of fire on earth
Ice patterns on glass

"Jeffery is a soul-awakener, a boy dryad, an aesthete of beauty & nature. It is easy to feel kindred to him because he wakes up a part of one that often drifts off to sleep." -Marly Youmans

Night Jar

detonates the woods
A hungry moth beats its face against a flower

World's heartbeat

"These poems are numinous, as any gospel should be." -Janet Lembke

The Hummingbirds

Twilight
The male's throat fire
& ruby powers

The female
subtler

Her light
simpler

Wings:
earthquake

flash
in air

Jeffery Beam is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, musical collaboration, & criticism. He is a botanical librarian in the Biology-Chemistry Library at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Every Knee Must Bow

Blue shade:

trumpet vine obeisance
to honey bee

"How large a canvas he can paint with a few deft strokes." -The Independent (Raleigh)

Night Gospel

Moon bronze cup

"Simplicity for Beam does not mean banality, either in thought or expression. It means attention strained to the utmost when directed at the natural world: not so much an illumination of it but a seeing of the radiance in it that others do not & singing its orgasmic force." -Douglas Chambers

Not Afraid

Pale perfect passion disappears
Lizard sunning on stone
Stone sunning on sun

"Gospel Earth is thrilling and choice." -James McGarrell

Revelation of the Cloud

winds clouds boom
the hubbub starts again

Remembered quote, once taped to the side of a bookcase in the UNC Bull's Head Bookshop: "People who say they love poetry and never buy any are a bunch of cheap sons-of-bitches." -Kenneth Patchen

How to order: Available for Ingram Book Company orders: ask your local bookstore. (Standard discount applies.) Also: Skysill Press, 3 Gervase Gardens, Clifton Village, Nottingham, NG11 8LZ, United Kingdom. http://www.skysillpress.blogspot.com/ Sam.Ward@nottingham.ac.uk You may write Skysill for more information if you would like to do a post or write a review about Jeffery Beam.

More right now? www.unc.edu/~jeffbeam/index.html