Thaliad and thanks

Early morning facebook post: Smolder of light in the dense clouds... Tiny rift of blue above Glimmerglass, gone gunmetal gray. Momentary canyons break into day-after-hurricane clouds; the awe of world-weather is with us again. But this time we have no giant Kentucky coffee tree on the cars and, to my surprise and delight, never lost power.

And I have worked on marketing, one of those things that I do not particularly love but which must be done in a year when a writer publishes a novel, a collection of poems, and an epic poem in blank verse--A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, The Foliate Head, and now Thaliad.

The new Thaliad page for this website is now up (see tab above.) It offers a little taste of the words and images that will appear in the book. Please take a glance, and let me know if there's anything you see amiss or that you would like to see there. A link to the pre-order page at Phoenicia Publishing is tucked in as well. 

What a year for books! I thought A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage an unusually handsome novel, immaculately designed for Mercer by the Burt and Burt team. Then I fell in love with Andrew Wakelin's design and Clive Hicks-Jenkins's art (green men!) for The Foliate Head from Stanza Press in the UK. But now I am struck by the great beauty of Thaliad. It is profusely illustrated by Clive Hicks-Jenkins and designed by Elizabeth Adams of Phoenicia Publishing in Montreal. Just looking at the print-out--as I must do today, checking for tiny spacing problems and so on--brings home to me what a marvelous collaboration it has been.

I am lucky and blessed to have such friends to me and my books (those mentioned and many more) in the worlds of art and publishing, and again I want to thank Mercer, Burt and Burt, Andrew, Clive (and Peter too!), and Beth for their great gifts of time and love and care for beauty. Thank you for believing that my writing was worth those gifts.

And to all who trust in the work enough to be my readers, many thanks. We live in a peculiar time when the media and the powers of the world like to cast fairy glamour on dead leaves and rot--to encourage people to value and run after things that are empty of life and worth. For this reason, I am especially grateful for those readers who find joy (though sometimes glimpsed through darkness) in my words and continue to support my passion for making story and song. Thank you.

The writer operates at a peculiar crosswords where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location. --Flannery O' Connor

At the mouth of the Susquehanna

Since tropical storm Lee and the Susquehanna have wreaked havoc in New York and Pennsylvania and forced  more than a hundred thousand out of their homes, I am taking a walk-in-pictures (a small walk--I live hard by the mouth of the Susquehanna where it flows out of Lake Otsego) to the bridge over the river and Lakefront Park.  The mighty Susquehanna, so broad where I crisscross it on my way south, is usually a tiny river in Cooperstown--not much more like a wide, shallow creek.  In these photographs you will see the view from the bridge and the park--Susquehanna River, Lake Otsego, Lion Mountain, and bits of the park with ironweed and obedience plant and others planted last year to help control flooding.

Water Day

Photograph credit:  Rain on lady's mantle
courtesy of sxc.hu and michaelaw.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

    Robert Frost was a clever fellow and wonderful word twister, but at the moment it seems more likely that the world will "melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew."  It is our first school Water a.k.a. Rain Day, and the list of closings is very long--businesses and schools shut near and far. Lee and Irene have gone on my list for potential baddies in fiction.

Postcards from Irene

Home from the Carolinas. No power. Tree on both cars. Wind and rain, home sweet home. Update:  here are a few photographs taken in my back yard... Ain't complainin' now--Nate and I chased a NYSEG truck and begged for power (we were not scheduled, and the NYSEG office said at least a week more, maybe two or three), and now we have jerry-rigged power! Lines looped up everywhere and bound to be turned off and fixed some day, but we care not because it is light. Begging with good humor seems quite effective. The power return was quite a bit quicker than our last hurricane, Fran, when we were in the dark with cold showers in Chapel Hill-Carrboro for fifteen days.

Backyard urn toppled.

Our cars decked in Coffee Tree spars, branches, and leaves.

All those bare trees?  Those are really the fallen, wind-stripped
crown of a 70-80 foot Kentucky Coffee Tree.
The vultures and I are really going to miss that tree.
It made gorgeous shapes against the sky.

Our two cars that are now complete Bash-and-Dingmobiles.

Roof broken and pried off by the Kentucky Coffee Tree.
Our back yard ends at the wall of the little broken building.

Beautiful little nineteenth-century Cooper smokehouse
with arches on the other side where the fuel went in--
the bricks were smashed all along the roof and halfway down the wall.
Who needs power when you have sunshine pouring in?

The new skyline from my back yard.
From upstairs I can see more of the lake and Kingfisher Tower
than before, but I would have been happy to keep the tree.
The lake was just as much there then as now,
and I felt the tree was mine in the way that Thoreau felt
that a neighboring farmer's apple trees were his.