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...

Insomniac party with Christian Wiman

I have been reading and enjoying Christian Wiman's Ambition and Survival, picked up at the West Chester Poetry Conference in June and signed by himself . . . What did I say to him? Nothing much. What was I to him but another blurred face passing?

But when I woke at 4:00 a.m., I wandered here and there and settled on this Wiman essay. It has many figures and moments I recognize and respond to; it captures something of Traherne's visionary infant sight; it has facets, worth lifting into lamplight, here in the hours of dark. And so in the end, I commune with him, and though insomniac and weary, I am tossed by his joyful, painful instants of life.

Catherine Wiecher Brunell's first book

It's always interesting when somebody you know publishes her first book. In this case, it was Catherine Wiecher Brunell, one of the people I met through Miroslav Volf's Faith as a Way of Life national working group at Yale Divinity School. I wish her book well and hope that it finds that splendid little boat, readership. It is told in the scrupulously honest voice of a woman in search of how to live and love.

She sent me a copy of the book, and I tossed it on to a friend who is an editor and someone I know Catherine would like to see the book. But first I copied a little passage from the middle of Becoming Catholic Again (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2012):

I really have no idea about everything the divine entails and what exactly religion should be. I also don't know what will happen as I come to the end of my life or what the church will look like in a hundred years. But I do know how to respond to the grace that moves in my life today. I try to keep my faith this simple, because ultimately this is what puts me in relationship with an incarnate God. When I say yes to what is before me in life, I know that I am saying yes to the sacred that is there, too. God is in the concrete, and concrete life is in God p. 85.

Kathryn Stripling Byer in the NCLHF

Kathryn Stripling Byer has been inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame--many congratulations to her! Kay was the first writer I encountered on a regular basis, back when I was in high school, already thinking of myself as a poet. I'd bump into her at the university library where both she and my mother worked at the time, and often we'd chat there or outside.

We had a similar background in some ways--I spent part of every summer in Georgia, where she grew up, and we both had lighted on Cullowhee because of other people's jobs. I still read Kay's books and am in Cullowhee often, so I have many reasons to think of her.

She has been an active poet laureate for North Carolina, generous to other writers and young people. I am glad to see her now collecting another tribute to her long faithfulness to the art.

You may find her at Here, Where I Am: http://kathrynstriplingbyer.blogspot.com/.

Being inducted into the state Hall of Fame, serving as poet laureate, winning the Lamont Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Hanes Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers – Byer’s body of work has been duly celebrated and honored. -Quintin Ellison, The Sylva Herald