Next up: reading at The Village Library of Cooperstown. And a pail of snow. So wash your face in crystal...

Just 'cause: end-of-November ice. And slippery snow. And snowmen. Because Yankeedom in winter. Because fire. Because cats. Because poetry. Because Emily. Also Paul Tree (leafy Facebook alias) aka Paul Digby, who made this. (And because nobody should be allowed to take off Emily Dickinson's clothes.)

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Comments and review clips HERE

Reading from Glimmerglass, 

Q and A afterward...

Nights at the Round Table series

Village Library of Cooperstown

Cooperstown New York

3 December 2014

Wednesday

7:00 p.m.

I know of no writers other than Marly Youmans who have 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

Madness and blue roses

How to order hardcover or paperback from anywhere? Go here.
Phoenicia Publishing of Montreal, 2012:
Book design by Elizabeth Adams,
The marvelous interior and exterior art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins of Wales.

Here's the merest snip of dangerous weather on the lake from Thaliad . . .  . Because I am dreaming of hot weather and a thunderstorm over Lake Otsego instead of ice and ice and blebs and icicles and rimed crystals and simple prisms and stellar or sectored plates and dendrite crystals and triangulars and plate crystals and fernlike stellar dendrites and bullet rosettes and crystal needles and hollow or capped columns and double plates or split plates and snow and snow and did I say ice and snow? Ah, the alien, barely inhabitable realm of Yankee winter with its radiating dendrites--so strange, so insane, so cold-and-virus laden, so ingenious in its complex miseries, so full of barkings like a seal, so many-kleenexed, so white, so starry, so shivery, so interminable, so Narnian, so White Witchian.

See that white woman on the jacket of Thaliad? She's cold, isn't she? And she's dreaming about leaves and birds and fruit. But she's white as snow! Give that poor child some leafy frolic, will you?

Excuse me, y'all, while I go out into the back yard and howl my no-doubt temporary madness caused by accumulated stars and my nigh-complete despair of spring, letting the echoes (in a Southern accent) reverberate from the ice of Otsego bloody Lake. Thank you for your kind understanding.

And now for a moment of heat, excessive heat . . .

The roses blossomed on heat’s lattices

In blues no earthly rose could conjure up—

Great cabbage roses, bruising cumulus

With pearly dew that sluiced the prickled stems

And, sliding on cold streams within the air,

Vaulted from a moveable precipice

To slam from heights on wind-lashed surfaces

As lightning’s forests sprouted upside down.

Somewhere impossible to breathe and be,

Where cataracts are ring-tailed roarers seized

And then let go, where hail is grown from dust

Like instant pearls to rattle in the sky.

A power struck war hammers on the rose

And rock of anvil-clouds: the rain obscured,

Erased the land, ascended as a mist.

Of course, any time we get some good old burning heat up here, it's going to transform into something ridiculous like a violent hailstorm. Because that's just how it is on the edge of a deep, mysterious Yankee lake with its own castle and fjordish serpent.

Winterspell

Portal detail from a sculpture, WCU North Carolina Glass
2012--alas, not sure which one this was...

Cheery, agile little bug of a bulldozer starts jingling outside my bedroom window around 6 a.m., cutting down snow walls and thrusting them up-up-up into a dump truck. This is the way of the No'th. I object, but the unremitting cheerfulness continues.

The pyramid glowing in the fireplace resembles a heap of brilliant orange topaz and immediately sets flame to any new spar of wood. It emits heat and sleep. It appears perfect and alien.

Stars. Crystal. Snow snatches at my foot, slips it away. I flail at the air, become buoyant, do not fall. Yet.

There has been snow and will be more snow. Occasionally the windows are so blind with falling flakes that for a moment it feels like the end of the world. I read the news, which seems strangely upside down and inside out. A fatwa against polio vaccination, selfies with the president, wranglings over the existence of global warming, macaques who have learned to steal coins and use vending machines, a teen in a banana costume with a rifle... A boy murders a girl, wishing to sell his soul to the devil. The group Reporters without Borders demotes the country to 46th in press freedom, and the Founding Fathers rotate like factory spindles in the grave. The sky blues and brightens and now begins very slowly, imperceptibly, to gather cloud for tomorrow's snow. "For destruction ice / Is also great."

Bunches. Little bunches. Sparrows, juncos, chickadees, titmouses, the bright exclamation of a cardinal. Stabs at the bowl. Hammerings of a seed against the lilac. The temperature has risen to -5, and the brave little birds flit from the rose canes to the feeder to the lilac and then puff themselves up in the sun. For the first time this winter, I see a goldfinch at the feeder--and now the first purple finch of the year! Perhaps there is hope for another spring.

Winter gratitudes

Freezing dusk is closing
   Like a slow trap of steel
On trees and roads and hills and all
   That can no longer feel.
     But the carp is in its dept
        Like a planet in its heaven
     And the badger in its bedding
        Like a loaf in the oven.
     And the butterfly in its mummy
        Like a viol in its case.
      And the owl in its feathers
        Like a doll in its lace.
                --Ted Hughes, from "The Warm and the Cold" (Collected Poems, p. 343)

It's -15 at a little after nine in the morning; when I woke, I found the pipes were frozen, so it has been a morning of rousting children to help while getting another child off to school. I seldom bother to use a dryer on my hair, but they're quite handy with pipes. Water is again flowing, and I am feeling glad and grateful not to have a houseful of plumbers this morning. And I also see that, after more than two weeks of that scourge, the flu, I really am going to get well. And for that I am even more grateful. Yankee winters are a bit of a trial if you're not raised to them, and so I shall stay home longer and write and do some cleaning (because an old house with five residents takes a lot of ordering and scrubbing) and let the world tick on without me. Outside a flock of birds is settled in a ravel of rose canes, one or two or three darting out to the feeder and then flitting back, fleeing deep in the canes to hide from the kestrel who regards our yard as territory. So it goes on planet Earth on a wintry morning. Good cheer to you, world!

Thanks to all the people who wrote notes or left comments on the prior post or elsewhere about the poem in answer to an inaugural challenge. To write such a thing is to reply to a very particular sort of dare, with demands set by the form, but also mediated by one's concerns about the country--in my case, I was thinking of a particular distress I feel for the chasm that has now been set between the two major parties and their adherents, so that there is a lot of voiced hatred and scorn for "the other." So it's a curious task.

Moomintroll Midwinter

This week has had and continues to have entirely too much long-distance ferrying during snowstorms. I have seen great armies of snow devils, whirling snow spouts, too many gusty white-outs, snow wreaths, a snow rainbow near the sun, a wiggly set of back-and-forth tracks (up a small mountain or large hill--it felt like a mountain) that I made myself with my little Toyota, snowfalls, and other delightful machinations of the tiny cold stars of snow.

Illustration from Tove Jansson's Moomintroll Midwinter.