"Glorying in the language and the hope"

You may find a post at Elizabeth Adams's Phoenicia Publishing commenting on the review of Thaliad by poet Rachel Barenblat, aka Velveteen Rabbi, here. The full review can be found at Velveteen Rabbi.

In our era when poetry books often go without a greeting from the world, I am especially grateful for Rachel Barenblat's time and care in penning (or keyboarding!) a strong and lovely review.

Here is a clip:

The epic poem form is not an easy one, and in lesser hands this audacious project would have failed...but Marly makes it work. The subject matter, postapocalyptic survival, is grand enough to merit the form she's chosen -- and the children's journey is told with deep sentiment but no cloying sentimentality. This is a beautiful and powerful book -- worth owning, worth reading and rereading. I am so glad that it exists in the world and that I can turn to it, time and again, glorying in the language and the hope:

The promise harvest years would be ahead,
For conifers and oaks, the hickories
And walnuts, spruces, pines were blossoming
And clouding air with fertile shining silt
That somersaulted in a beam of sun,
That changed the spiderwebs to something rich,
That kissed the surfaces of Glimmerglass
And turned its scalloped border into gold,
That moved across the air as if alive,
The landscape's bright epithalamion,
The simple golden wedding of the world.

"Except the heart"

rereading Jung's Man and His Symbols (1964): 
Aniela Jaffe, "Symbolism in the Visual Arts"

Man and His Symbols approaches its 50th birthday... Rereading pieces of the book, I am struck by how pertinent some of its efforts to reconcile the past and Modernism still appear, as well as how well Jaffe's comments on visual arts apply to all the arts--as Chagall suggests when he says "painting, like all poetry."

Jaffe:  Chagall's quest in his work is also a "mysterious and lonely poetry" and "the ghostly aspect of things that only rare individuals may see." But Chagall's rich symbolism is rooted in the piety of Eastern Jewish Hassidism and in a warm feeling for life. He was faced with neither the problem of the void nor the death of God. He wrote: "Everything may change in our demoralized world except the heart, man's love, and his striving to know the divine. Painting, like all poetry, has its part in the divine; people feel this today just as much as they used to."
   The British author Sir Herbert Read once wrote of Chagall that he never quite crossed the threshold into the unconscious, but "has always kept one foot on the earth that had nourished him." This is exactly the "right" relation to the unconscious. 

The French painter Alfred Manessier defined the aims of his art in these words: "What we have to reconquer is the weight of lost reality. We must make for ourselves a new heart, a new spirit, a new soul, in the measure of man. The painter's true reality lies neither in abstraction nor in realism, but in the reconquest of his weight as a human being."

Jean Bazaine: "...A form that can reconcile man with his world is an 'art of communion' by which man, at any moment, can recognize his own unformed countenance in the world."

Jaffe: What in fact artists now have at heart is a conscious reunion of their own inward reality with the reality of the world or of nature; or, in the last resort, a new union of body and soul, matter and spirit. That is their way to the "reconquest of their weight as human beings." Only now is the great rift that set in with modern art (between "great abstraction" and "great realism") being made conscious and on the way to being healed.

Jaffe: And yet it seems important that the suggestion of a more whole, and therefore more human, form of expression should have become visible in our time.

Tomorrow's post: Most questions answered no. 3: about Giacometti's The Palace at 4:00 a.m. and the title of this blog. Secrets revealed!

Mezzo Cammin, again--

Six poems of mine are up at Mezzo Cammin, edited by poet Kim Bridgford. Below find a taste, the first three lines of each. Three of the six poems will be in The Book of the Red King, some day.

If you would like to read more of my poems, check the contributors' notes--mine has links to other poems in earlier issues. Recent in-print poetry books of mine are: Thaliad (just out, a post-apocalyptic epic in blank verse from Phoenicia Publishing in Montreal, with wonderful art from Clive Hicks-Jenkins); The Foliate Head (a 2012 collection of poems from Stanza Press in the UK, also with art--green men!--from Clive); and The Throne of Psyche (a 2011 collection from Mercer University Press.) See tabs above for more about each--available worldwide in hardcover, as well as paperback for two of the books.

Little Epithalamium

As soul and body join,

As God was born in flesh,

As Psyche married Love,

L-O-V-E

In glittering clouds of snow the Red King sits

And meditates, and the word LOVE is all

His mantra:  L’s the scoop that hurls his thoughts

The Bloodroot Fool

Corm-sprung

And nectarless,

Blown from another world,

Great Work of Time

The Alchemist to the Fool

This you must know:

                                     the world is a bright glass,

Reflecting all the universe

Spring in Fall                      

World new-washed with a raindrop on the tip

Of every yellow leaf, strung and hung

For miles into the distance . . . all dew and new,

The Sheaf of Wheat

Subtle, suffused light in the sheaf of grain

Is pale gold that’s almost silver,

Like, in a certain leaning light, the rain,

Saline tributes welcome

It is Sunday, and I am feeling pleased, satisfied, and downright merry that a goodly number of readers have reported crying over Thaliad. Trala! I'm very fond of both laughter (with not at) and tears in readers, and think it a grand privilege to inspire them.