Anders, Charis, Red King

Another "tiny" at North American Anglican: 

Anders, Young and Old

And if you go here on the NAA site, you can take a look at more tinies and a few poems.  Thanks so much to Clinton Collister for requesting poetry and tinies! 

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Clips from new reviews of Charis in the World of Wonders:

Photo by Paul Digby

A charming literary work that envelops the reader in the chaotic frontier life of Puritan Massachusetts.

--Historical Novel Society Issue 93, August 2020

Youmans shrewdly presents the collective madness of witch trials as one of many destructive forces in the world — on a level with Indian massacres, concussions, and drowning. As such, the hysteria seems less alien, our modern complacencies less sure, leaving behind the uneasy suspicion that we may be as prone to collective madness as they are, and as blind to it, lulled by the tools we vainly depend upon, just as they depend on their brimstone preaching, to save us from destruction. This sojourn in Charis and the World of Wonders lets us experience reality bare of illusions: life can end at any moment, avoiding grief is folly, joys should be taken gratefully when they come, and creation is full of beauty, fear, mystery, and God.

--novelist H. S. Cross. "In the Liminal Zone," The Living Church (Anglican Communion), 30 July 2020

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And here's a pandemic poem from The Book of the Red King...

The Cloud Like a Child

A Folk Story of the Red King’s Kingdom

A cloud no bigger than a child appeared

And hovered just above the castle spires.

Next the sickness came with evening sweats

That seemed to bleed all force away from those

Who ploughed or pounded hammers at the forge,

Strong souls who laughed at first but later wept.

At night the cloud became a rag of blood

That served to veil the brightness of the moon,

And people said, “The end of the world is near.”

The greater part of the Red Kingdom’s men

Died, and no child was born, for women all

Were barren. So the Red King in that time

Took pity on the sons and daughters who

Were not and seemed unlikely to become:

Three generations he raised them from stones

Until the demon rag was worn to shreds

And lost to every eye except the King’s.

So was preserved the kingdom of his love. 

You may see and hear a reading of the poem here.

Tinies no. 7

In this installment of Tinies, Old Martin appears as a young man.

New to Tinies? These are pieces I've written while spending so much time on a major reading project that I've had little time to write. They are wandering word-doodles, leading where they will. To read from the start, click on the little Tinies label below or scroll down.

New to my work? My 2012 books are a novel, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, and a collection of poems, The Foliate Head. Last year saw another collection, The Throne of Psyche. You can click on the tabs above for more information. Also forthcoming this year is a long poem, Thaliad.

YOUNG MARTIN

One day I asked Old Martin how he came to be here.

My picture of what happened to him is obscure. Certain words keep their strangeness: causeway, car, suburbs. We have none of those things.

Old Martin (he was Young Martin then) drove along a causeway with a steep drop on either side. Suddenly the world darkened, as if the car’s windows had turned to smoked glass. The air grew steadily darker, and he grew more and more uneasy. He opened the door to look for a yellow dividing line on the road. A small popping noise inside his head made Young Martin suspect that he was having an ocular migraine.

He frequently saw rain in the middle distance, he told me, when it was not raining at all.

When he reached the end of the causeway, he pulled onto the edge of the road. Slowly the darkness ebbed, but the world looked unfamiliar. He thought it must be the afterglow of his aura, but the sensation did not wear off when he drove on.

The road did not take him through the suburbs he expected but dwindled into a rutted track between flowering trees. Eventually all his fuel burned away, and he was forced to get out and walk.

Young Martin’s head ached. It was raining in the middle distance, and as he walked, the rain moved ahead of him like an enormous but fragile pillar.

7 July 2012

Tinies no. 6

The windows are open and the cool August air is flowing through the house. Up here in the land of the Yanks, it's time to root for sweaters already...

Tinies no. 6 lands on a Sunday, and that seems right because it's called "Words," and my favorite verse in the Bible invokes the rich, multi-stranded idea of λόγος (Logos): In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Tinies no. 6 is a smaller view of "word," although it too involves (as in Genesis 1) the making of a world (here in imagination) by through words.

If you want to read all the tinies, either scroll down or else click on the Tinies label below. They will make more sense that way!

WORDS

Old Martin taught us the words. He made us a dictionary and wrote down what he remembered. It is a lot and a little all at once.

I have pored over his pages, learning to read and then wanting to know everything about the place where I was born and where I belong. And I do know a great deal now, and how that world is faulty and fair at once and infinitely complex. Yet what I hold is only a fragment, and so much more might be known.

When I lie on my mat, dreaming of the other world where are people who know my name, I feel a great longing but also a kind of shame. I wonder if I am worthy of the dream, and whether my smattering of learning can ever compass the blue and green sphere of that world, flying, hooping the sun.

But that world must stay as is in my dreams: I shall never know more unless I find a way and pass through. So the old world pieced from Old Martin’s words must be partial and lame and tilted on an axis between knowing and unknowing.

4 July 2012

Tinies no. 5

BY AUGUST LIGHT
This was a busy morning with ferrying the eldest to an interview and having a friend who is going to Mozambique with my husband for a farmer's market brunch (hurrah for Mr. Perry, "The Welsh Baker!") and then a suitcase-contents inspection. Now I must get back to the big reading project, but first I'll post the fifth of the Tinies.

NEW TO TINIES?
It will definitely make more sense to dive back to Tinies no. 1 and read forward... You may do that easily by scrolling down or clicking on the Tinies label below.,

MY OLD HOME

A memory of two sorts of flowers in a meadow and a hand are hardly enough for home. And yet that memory tethers me to something that is solid and real, a whole world of icebergs and mountains and seas that lie in the great troughs between the mountains.

And yet it is only a wisp.

Perhaps when I have been here as long as Old Martin, I will forget the two sorts of flowers and the grassy meadow and the hand curled around mine and think that there is nothing but this world.

Or perhaps I will find a door and fall headlong into my world. And perhaps it will be like the fairy stories Old Martin told when I was small, and only a week will have passed, and the one who held my hand will know my face and name, and I will become a little child again.

But perhaps all will change in an instant, and I will be bent and old, my hair a great cloud of staticky white, and no one will know me in that place. Then I will have nothing but grief to hold my hand.

Perhaps I will find a door and turn the knob, yet only lie beside the opening, looking through at a brighter world that I dare not enter.

4 July 2012

Tinies no. 4

TINIES

It's time for another of the Tinies, those mysterious word-doodles that I have committed while being too busy with a major reading deadline to write (but one can't not write entirely, of course.) Scroll down to see earlier Tinies or else click on the Tinies label below.

PRAYER

Omin says that everything is a prayer. When he lets his glistening line into the deep, past the push of mid-sea waves and into the heavy stillness, right down until the world turns black: that’s prayer. When he brings up the pick-up sticks of the drowned, it’s prayer. When he cauls them in cloth made from the silk of spiders, that too is prayer. When he holds the pearls of eyes in his hands, prayer.

The passage of blood through his veins is prayer. The drift of the soul from the body, prayer. The scales of the fish, catching the light in rainbows and adhering to a salty, weathered bench, prayer. The sniff, sniff, sniff of the broom along the floor is prayer.

The first time I glimpsed what he meant, I felt the orb of sun rolling in my veins, shooting through me as if my body were a great pinball machine—though I have never seen such a thing, and my imaginings of objects from the other world are all filtered through Old Martin. What I felt was more life, an excess hardly bearable. It took me, and I cried out because always I fear being taken.

4 July 2012

ABOUT ME

If you're a newish visitor and want to find out more about my work, please explore the tabs above, particularly ones for my 2012 books: A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (novel and winner of The Ferrol Sams Award of Mercer University Press) and The Foliate Head (a limited edition poetry collection from Stanza Press in the U.K. with art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins and design by Andrew Wakelin.) Forthcoming in November is an post-apocalyptic epic poem in blank verse with vignettes by Clive Hicks-Jenkins and design by Elizabeth Adams: Thaliad (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing.)

Tinies no. 3

Here's another in a series of word doodles made during the months devoted to award reading (June-Sept 15), when I had (and have) little time for myself... Click on the "Tinies" label below if you would like to read from the beginning, or else scroll down.

If you want to see my 2012 publications, please check out the tabs above for the novel, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (Mercer), winner of The Ferrol Sams Award, and the just-out collection of poetry, The Foliate Head (UK: Stanza Press), with art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins and design by Andrew Wakelin, both of Wales. Limited edition. Forthcoming from Phoenicia Publishing in Montreal is a long poem, Thaliad, also with artwork by Clive.

REKNEL

Reknel is Omin’s other self: that is how they say wife or husband in this country. Where Omin is thin and big-headed like the stripped bones of a fish, Reknel is plump as a pastry wrapped around cream. Where Omin travels endlessly, letting down his lines into the ocean, Reknel stays moored at home.

She goes nowhere, sees nothing. She drifts from the cleaning board outside where she scrapes and guts the fish that Omin brings home to the outdoor pit where she roasts the flesh.

And yet Reknel knows—she lets down her line and catches the shadow of thoughts, lets them harden into silhouettes that she holds to the light. Her thoughts swim around her like black fish. She sits in the midst of a great and complex mobile of visible thought. I see the thinking run across her face like light.

She says that this world is just my world, folded an extra time.

I’m still pondering what that might mean.

3-4 July 2012

Tinies, no. 2

As I don't have time this summer to write anything of length, thanks to a major reading assignment, I have been writing fragments--what they are, I'm not sure. Odd, yes. Small also. Here's another, linked to no. 1:

OMIN THE COLLECTOR

Omin spends all his days fishing at sea. His spindly, absurd machines sparkle with salt and sun. He cranks the handles, lowering his intricate wheel upon wheel of line (silvery, glistening with scales) into the deep. It is his calling to collect the pearls that were eyes from the sea, to find every bone that sank, marionette-strung and jointed, into the green wave and down, down, down to where the fish begin to flicker in the long dark.

Omin is as rickety as his harrowing machine, with his long, thin arm and leg bones and the knobbles of his vertebrae that show when he bends to his work. I like to go with him on the boat, to hold his findings in my hands that are still young and not worn by the salt and waves of life. I like to think that some day I will be harrowed and fished from this world, flung into the meadow of light where I walked, hand in hand, before I found the tree with its little door.

For weeks at a time Omin wanders the ocean till his ears ring like church bells, and the waves tip back and forth like great cast bells, and his small white boxes are overflowing with pearls the size of jingle bells, and the bones are infinitely worn clappers wrapped in cloth to still them, keep them from vibrating—to bring rest to the drowned and lost so that the whole wobbling planet can be steadied and not call out to the stars and moons of space like a sounding bell.

Murmuring, almost singing, Omin tells me, “Nothing will be lost: nothing!”

2 July

If you're interested in seeing what's new with me, please check out the A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (new novel - The Ferrol Sams Award) and The Foliate Head (new collection of formal poetry) links above.

Tinies no. 1

I have discovered that having to read 316 books (I am on 190 right now, this very minute--just glanced away) in a short period of time is a good way to put a stop to my own writing. So I'm noodling about a bit, writing some Tinies that are related but maybe not going anywhere, maybe not prose poems, maybe not stories, maybe just seedlets blown like parachutes by the wind. Here's the first one.

KIDNAPPED

They took me. I was small and hardly remember, but there are seven of us who speak the old language in this place, and one who remembers--Old Martin, who was taken another way (by a greenish, glowing jellyfish that hovered in the sky, catching him in its tentacles and drawing him upward, or so he says when he doesn’t say “a machine of lights.” Or when he doesn't tell some other story entirely.) I love Old Martin because he taught me in secret the letters to write down what comes into my mind, what I see, what little I remember. 

And what was that?

Recollection is a meadow with dark blue flowers and red poppies, the feel of a hand curling around mine. It is a voice flaring in the dark, a shell cupped against my ear, a way that led into a tree: I felt the living braille of bark under my fingertips that said Open, and my hand drifted to the burnished knob. The gold against my skin tugged at me, sang at me, and called for me to twist, press, lean… 

I walked in. 

2 July 2012