Hands across enchanted seas

Clive Hicks-Jenkins
vignette on Tomoe River paper
for Charis in the World of Wonders

Often I am asked about what it's like to work--I always think the verb should be dance--with artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins. He has illuminated and beautified my books for a long time now. I often thought of us as metaphysical twins (I can't remember who first came up with that thought) when we first tumbled into correspondence. The first year of exchanging letters was so inspiring! It's marvelous when you meet a person who inspires you and whom you inspire in turn.

But the image above relates to the sort of small, surprising occurrence that happens when I'm "with" Clive, even if he is across Atlantic in Wales. Sometimes we're walking around in our old houses--Clive's Ty Isaf and my Prentiss Cottage--and pondering each other's work. So magical! And odd things happen as a result. Unexpected elements coalesce. Some are tiny but curious. Like the bird in leaves. A few days ago I told Clive that I had a Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign on my bedroom door as a child that reminded me so much of this piece. That's perhaps not wholly surprising, as Clive is using samplers as inspiration, and folk motifs often have some commonality. It seemed an interesting linkage since there is a thread and threat of witchcraft in Charis in the World of Wonders. So the book secretly holds an image that appears protective to me. Of Charis? Of the reader? Of me?

And when I stopped overnight in Middletown, VA on my way north from North Carolina, I had an evening adventure related to the image. I was staying at the 1797 Wayside Inn and went out for a ramble. I stopped by an antique shop that was a log house (built by German settlers who raised eight children there.) Although it was already late, the shop was open. I picked out a few gifts. Outside was a passionate, pleasantly unruly cottage garden, and I learned that there was a bigger garden with winding paths and night-blooming cereus plants and lilies and much more in the back. Though it was growing quite dark, I asked if Crystal (she credited her husband with the garden's design) would show me their garden. The paths were lovely, intermittently lit by solar lamps and huge open moonflowers. And there in the garden I was surprised by a hex sign exactly like the one that had hung on my bedroom door--an image I had not seen in decades--so that a sudden necklace of images flashed into my mind, its beads pilfered from Middletown, Virginia and Cullowhee, North Carolina and Aberystwyth, Wales.

And I guess that's one part of the half-hidden secret of why we like to dance together. Somehow when I'm in a Clivean-Marlyan mode, congruence seems to increase, and not just a congruence of minds. Surprise happens: things happen that suggest that the world is a more enchanted, spark-lit, symbolic place than we commonly know. It's as if we are turning around a hidden center, that we live in a place of abundance. And for moments I'm more congruent with the deep shapes and patterns of the world, and I feel heart-struck and tied in spirit to someone on the other side of the sea.

Log House Antiques and Collectibles in Middletown, Virginia

* * *

HERE's a poem that I wrote about dancing with Clive... 

Novelist Midori Snyder asked me for "Praise for Dark Movements Toy Theatre" for the Journal of Mythic Arts. Although I write mostly formal poetry, I have a whole group of praise poems that draw on a Yoruban form and Hebrew parallelism, and this is one of that sequence. 

The poem has the Mari Lwyd flickering in thorn trees and Yeats in the form of a silver bird and the Starlight Torch and Book of Moon and two friends in a white tent and lots of cheeses! And pie. And of course we dance. Enjoy!

* * *

Eep

I've mentioned Charis, but I'm sure she wants you to be better acquainted with the Red King and the Fool and Precious Wentletrap! It's out there in our Wonderland with a BUY ME Alice-label tied around its pages. So why not skip lunch and support beautiful small presses like Phoenicia Publishing?

***

Postscript

So strange to move quickly from summer lands to fall... Today the world looks even more symbolic and enchanted to me, a bright autumn sun streaming through dying red and yellow leaves as if through annealed glass. 

This glorious and transcendent place 

--George Herbert

Notes from the road, with poems--

See prior post for event news...

Detail of Dark Movements Toy Theatre
showing forest and the Mari Lwyd
by artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins

If you're interested in keeping up with my poetry, there are now four poems online at Journal of Mythic Arts that come from the new manuscript inspired by Yoruban praise poems. In addition to the two editor Midori Snyder posted last week, I now see "Night Journey from Kingfisher," a poem inspired by the view of Kingfisher Tower in Otsego Lake that I see from my writing room window, and also "Praise for Dark Movements Toy Theatre," a poem that came out of my friendship with Clive Hicks-Jenkins of Wales, who has beautified many of my books with his art. And he does make the most delicious toy theaters ever!

"Prothalamion for Linnet" 

"Kingfisher" 

"Night Journey From Kingfisher" 

"Praise for Dark Movements Toy Theatre"  

All is well, despite one major tire blowout and one allergic reaction (oh, the road, the road!), and I had a great time doing events at the Southern Booksellers Alliance Trade Show in Raleigh and soon will be heading off to Richmond for a number of events connected with the Makers Series. 

Thank you to Mary Beth Kosowski and Jenny Waters Toole of Mercer, and hosts Gail MacIntosh and Professor Michael Poteat in Greenville.

The word-twister's news

"Tamlaine" by James Herbert MacNair, 1905

Thank you to Micah Mattix for including Maze of Blood in this morning's Prufrock News. It's a great arts and letters newsletter, and I'm glad to be in it.

Oh! I just found Midori Snyder's lovely, interesting post about my two new poems in The Journal of Mythic Arts. Here it is, in her blog, In the Labyrinth, which is well worth following. She also links to reviews she has written of some of my books.

Night Journey from Kingfisher at The Journal of Mythic Arts
This poem and "Prothalamion for Linnet" are from a new manuscript inspired by Yoruban chants. I'm starting to send them out now and will be thinking about a publisher in the coming year.

Print journal North Carolina Literary Review will be publishing four others from the series,
"Spring Tree Egg,"
"Alice,"
"Night Blooming Cereus,"
and "She-Who-Changed."

Prothalamion for Linnet at The Journal of Mythic Arts
And thanks to Midori Snyder for collecting these poems from me!

You can look at the entire archive of poems here.  Endicott Studio is a wonderful site, full of interesting nooks and crannies, put together over many years by those notable women, Midori Snyder and Terri Windling. So stay and look around. It's where I first encountered the art of my friend Clive Hicks-Jenkins, who has beautified so many of my books.

The Annunciation Carved in a Medieval Nut in Books and Culture
Now up online as well as in the print edition.

And if you go here, you can see links to a lot of other poems by me in the magazine, as well as to reviews and "year's best" mentions. The editor, John Wilson, is quite possibly the best-read person I've ever met (well, I've never met him, but you know what I mean!)

Midori Snyder on "Maze of Blood"

A pre-pub review pilfered from novelist Midori Snyder's In the Labyrinth, a great place in general, and also a great place to find a review of "Maze of Blood," labyrinths and mazes being kindred... Though near the end of the pre-pub period (pub date is September 1), the book is already available.

February 24, 2015

An Early Review of Maze of Blood by Marly Youmans

“In the end, he thought, a neat labyrinth or an untidy maze was a place that was simple. You reached its heart and were devoured by the beast, or you reached its heart and the spot was absolutely bare and pulseless. Maybe the beast and the blankness were the same. Maybe it was the emptiness that had teeth and hollowed you out.”

Marly Youmans' new novel Maze of Blood is a fictionalized biography of a small town writer, based on the life of pulp fiction author Robert E. Howard, noted for his stories of extravagant adventure as well as his suicide at thirty years old, coinciding with the death of his mother. For both Howard and the protagonist Conall in Youmans' novel, it is hard to imagine a more terrible beauty than a writer’s life imploding in a maze of contradictions: to be gifted with boundless imagination but compelled to remain rooted in the dry soil of a Texas oil boom town; to have a mother as muse filling his childhood with a love of poetry and epics, and then emotionally trapping him in the narrative of her own slow dying; to connect via mail to an admiring world of fans and writers, and to be marginalized by local friends disparaging his work as a worthless activity.

Youmans’ evocative prose digs deep into the visceral ache of living perched between sublime poetry and harsh reality, between the refusal to compromise a writer’s prodigious vision and the price paid in isolation and loneliness. The novel is full of mythic moments: Conall believes his imagination was formed at childhood when touched by the luminous fire of a falling meteorite. He is alive to the world when he is creating it, folding in history, poetry, and epics into his story telling. There is something heroic about the way he rejects anything in mundane reality that interferes with that passion. Yet, Youmans also reveals the darker side of compulsions, the siren-song of his mother, calling him to a love of language, but drowning out all other voices save hers that might have influenced his life in a different direction.

Maze of Blood is a difficult story, but one so beautifully crafted by Youmans, unraveling in short chapters like prose poems constructed from spare dialogue, the dusty Texas landscape, a sudden flash of vibrant nature, and the sweep of a starlight sky. The reader can not escape the tragedy of the story, but Youmans weighs it against the more powerful scenes of a gifted storyteller, whose originality and labors transcend the confines of his life, allowing us a chance to celebrate the writer's efforts-- and perhaps because it burned so brightly in such a bleak place, we value it the more.

Maze of Blood by Marly Youmans is due out later this Fall from Mercer University Press -- with another handsome cover from Clive Hicks-Jenkins and design from Mary-Frances Glover Burt. Check out the tempting sneak peeks of the art shown above and below.

Early bird review!

Novelist Midori Snyder has written a thoughtful and very early review of Maze of Blood at her site, In the Labyrinth. Since I can't possibly thank her enough for writing an entire review when she was asked for a mere blurb, be sure and go and noodle around her website and take a look at her books, too! That would make a great thanks, and her site is an especially interesting one.

***

And since the book will not be out until fall, I'll just remind people that my current in-print books are Glimmerglass, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Thaliad, The Foliate Head, and The Throne of Psyche. Click on the tabs above to find out more about them.

Image: Detail with wing and name, cover for Maze of Blood... from the wonderful hands and brain-maze of Clive Hicks-Jenkins. See the finished image here!

Glimmerglass by starlight

Click on the picture for a larger version
of the catalogue page.

STARS

I ended the day last night with stargazing... The brilliance of the sky lured us to wander down to Council Rock park and use the ipad to identify constellations hanging over Otsego Lake aka Glimmerglass. The lake looked especially glimmerglassian by starlight, quite smooth with very slight motion and one little fish making an ecstatic jump from the water and back again. The hills made black shadows on the lake, the edge of the lake and the surface punctuated by pinpricks and smears of pale yellow light from lawn and lake-edge lamps.

SO SWEET

I was so very pleased to be on novelist-and-more Midori Snyder's facebook list of 10 books that made a lasting impression that I'm going to post the whole list:

So my friend Terri Windling-Gayton called me out to pick 10 Books that have made a lasting impression on me...which is rough because there are just so many, many books! And by lasting, I think I should include the books of my childhood too...So here goes in an approximate chronological order from younger to older of just the fiction:

Half Magic by Edgar Eager
Once and Future King by T. H. White
Everything by J.R.R. Tolkien
100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ingledove, by Marly Youmans
Just about every short story by Flannery O'Connor and her letters
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Urea
St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell
The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

I liked and was interested in her reasons for picking the book, and think it was a good pinch of attention for me--I need to get that one back into print.

THE OTHER GLIMMERGLASS

Tomorrow is pub date for the new novel. It managed to sneak up on me because I forgot the old verse beginning, "30 days hath September." [Addendum: No, it's not! I finally got the rhyme to go right, and pub date is Monday...] Those of you who have been friends to my writing and helped get the word out, thank you. Word of mouth is a great thing for a midlist writer, and I am grateful. If you are so inclined, please share the news. That's the best kind of launch for a book. You have my once-and-future thanks!

I'll be doing various sorts of events in Virginia, New York (including the city), North Carolina, and perhaps Georgia (working on that idea.) More are in the works. You can see current plans here.

Midori Snyder on Thaliad

Novelist Midori Snyder has written a lovely piece about the upcoming Thaliad on her blog, In the Labyrinth. She has read the book twice, a thing I love--rereading is the best reading--and has some interesting things to say about it in her post, "The Sublime Collaboration of Author Marly Youmans and Artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins: Thaliad." 

She also sent a blurb that draws on the review but is somewhat different from it. I appreciate her time and consideration, reading the book twice and then writing a blog post about it.

Perhaps I should say that I did not think of the poem as one that would be marketed to young people even though they hold the starring roles in most of the dramatic action. But Midori has taught young men, 15-18, and she thinks the poem would do well with that age group.  

Me, I hope it will do well with the 15-115 age group! 

Nevertheless, I think there's only gain in widening the audience to include teens, and I will be interested to see if a long blank verse poem appeals to that age group. Here is a blurb Midori wrote (similar to the review) for the book:

Marly Youmans’ The Thaliad offers a healing balm to the swath of nihilistic post-apocalyptic fiction for young adults. Told in free verse reminiscent of heroic epics (Homer meets Gerald Manley Hopkins),  and packed with fairy tale and mythic references, The Thaliad recounts the aftermath of a fiery apocalypse, and the perilous journey of a band of children led by a girl whose prophetic visions guide them to a sanctuary on the edge of a lake. Here, they confront the challenges of re-creating the world – a world illuminated by hope and love.

Youmans has given young adults a wondrous text filled with richly layered and evocative poetry. Like a bardic tale, it demands to be read aloud. The images of nature are sensual, fertile, a source of healing. Violence is hammered into fierce staccato rhythms and Thalia’s ecstatic visions soar with heat and light as the human spirit is consoled by the divine. We are not spared the hardships of the journey, but through the storyteller’s voice we have confidence in our destination—it is this commitment to the angels of our better nature in Youmans' sublime poetry that gives Thaliad its power to inspire hope out of fear and love out of hate.

Interesting thought about the five blurbs-to-be-revealed for this book: They're rather long and will have to be snipped for the rear of the jacket/cover, but three out of five talk about loving to hear it outloud. I like that because I care intensely how my poems sing and sound.

Coming tomorrow: hobbits and habits, dwarves and rather short people (like me), the arts, books, the peddler's pack, a royal report...

Gold-motes

GOLDEN SEA

I've signed onto Makoto Fujimura's Kickstarter project and hope you will as well. I admire Mako and his nihongan-style painting, as do many people around the globe.

LABYRINTH

Midori Snyder has shared Paul Digby's wonderful video of my poem "In Extremis," and reminded me of her lovely blog, In the Labyrinth: She also has this and more to say about The Throne of Psyche: "First up read Marly Youmans's splendid and mythicaly off the charts collection of poems, The Throne of Psyche. It will get under your skin immediately -- like all myth and fairy tale weaving together darkness and violence, coupled with beauty and transcendence. The taproot of nature anchors the poems in the material world but family and the powerful bonds of maternal love invite the visionary power of grace."
The Throne of Psyche book page here

QUAIL RIDGE BOOKS: QUAIL MAIL #648 (July 18)

Reader review by Mamie: Nancy, I agree 100% with your comments about A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage by Marly Youmans (Mercer $24). This book is to be savored, read over and over, and thought about in between readings! It has, as you said, all the markings of a true classic. -- Mamie
A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage book page here