Cassandra in word and image

Some recent images of Iceland by Elizabeth Adams.
Click for a larger view.

Book designer, artist, writer, publisher, editor and more... If you haven't taken a peek at the recent work of Elizabeth Adams, I recommend that you do. She is a wonderful example of spirit in action, moving toward the beautiful.

Beth has a lot of muscular new pieces inspired by her trip to Iceland, all discussed on her blog, The Cassandra Pages. Want a print or painting of your own? Try Studio Cassandra, where Beth has a brand new Etsy shop with work that is affordable and beautiful.

She is the publisher at the Montreal small press, Phoenicia Publishing, where she also edits and does design work. (My long poem Thaliad, with art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, will appear from Phoenicia, but in the meanwhile there are other lovely books and more to see there.)

Boy tail gunner

I was glad to see this picture of my father and the rest of the crew of the Incendiary Blonde. (My father is standing, all the way to the right.) At seventeen, my father left his life as a sharecropper's son near Lexsy, Georgia, joined the Army Air Corps, and began to see the world as he trained in the West and North. I remember him telling me that people elsewhere were ignorant about the South, and how a woman in Kutztown, PA asked him about the family slaves.

Before long, he was serving as a tail gunner with on the Incendiary Blonde (91st Bomb Group), based in England and flying on runs over Germany and France. He was tall and slender, and would do a backward roll when leaving his perch in the tail of the plane.

The linked picture was taken shortly after shrapnel struck and killed the mid-waist gunner, Blaine Corbin (the name is spelled incorrectly in the note.) My father told me that the day Corbin died was the very last day that waist gunners were utilized in World War II. Ill luck married irony in that loss. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I see that his widow, Ruth, died just last year... She married again, graduated from college, saw life bring her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and appears to have been the sort of volunteer who blesses the world with work. She lived a different life from the one she began with Blaine, but it seems as though it was a good one.

They are almost all gone now, the men in that picture, though they were beautiful with youth not so long ago. Some of the vivid traits in the character of Pip in A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage come from my father.

For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass... 1 Peter 1:24

Glancing down from the book heap--

I must finish reading some books for a phone conference in the morning, plus I have a ferrying job today, so . . . frolic as you like, here or elsewhere! Soon I will do a post on the recommended new(ish) poetry books, so if you have something to add, please add a book. I am surprised by how many people have popped by to read this piece, and am wondering if that is simply because I mentioned a controversy (Giraldi-Ohlin), or whether people relish the idea of turning their backs on things they are "supposed" to do and following the muse through "hollow lands and hilly lands." Perhaps both.

Postscript: Poet Luisa Igloria wrote one of her daily poems in response to yesterday's The gulf of night...

Post-postscript: You know that business about the roaming balrogs in the comments header? They're getting quite fat.

The gulf of night--

I wake up, three hours after I fell asleep. Someone is snoring, and one of my children has gone to bed with all the lights left burning. It is the bottom of the night, the beginning of day, the place where unease is stored. Lying in bed, I worry about all sorts of things I cannot compass. I worry about whether my husband will be eaten this fall by something that sneaks around the tent platform at night, far off in Mozambique (even though he is still here) or by some trampling or lurching creature in the day. I worry about my several grown or nearly-grown children and my youngest, soon to start tenth grade. Then I worry about whether my latest novel will survive a launch without ARCs and about the familiar craziness of publishing's luck and error. (But I don't bother worrying about the new book of poetry because the book is so beautiful and because these days poetry is always doomed.) I worry about various invitations to speak far away and whether I can manage to take them. I worry about whether I will finish reading 316 novels for my judging stint by deadline, and whether I can juggle reading those books plus being mother and father to three at-home children when my husband goes wandering.

I had forgotten how one feels unease at the bottom of the night, just before the birds wake and the sun hauls itself up over the horizon. Were it not for the details and the aches that tell me my age, I might be roaming the dark places of my 20's.

All of this sweeps through me in moments. Then I give my worry away to the air that drifts through the window. The unease floats away, upward, seeking after heaven like strange incense.