THALIAD art news

Clive's studio.

News for early Thaliad buyers: Clive Hicks-Jenkins has finished the bookplates for first purchasers, and they are now drying in his studio! So you may expect arrival within the next few weeks. They will have to be packaged, of course, and travel here and there... I will be mailing all the U. S. orders. Not sure how I will do that exactly--must get some little envelopes and cardboard, I suppose.

If you're not in that group and want a copy, go here to say the various ways to buy a hardcover or paperback Thaliad, which even without a bookplate is a splendiferous collaboration between poet, artist, and book designer Elizabeth Adams. The book is available internationally through the publisher, mail order venues, and bookstores (via Ingram or by Amazon's special bookstore service.) Hardcovers are only available through Phoenicia (limited editions, so they won't be around forever.)

Morning snow, with books--

Time for some Sendakian morning cake! And in the wake-up news, I'm glad to see the lead-off book review in Arsenio Orteza's "Notable Books: four notable works of fiction" from worldmag.com: A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. I'm especially glad to see this at the moment because in my scurryings-about to help the adventurous Thaliad, I am always in danger of forgetting my other two 2012 books. It's not easy to juggle three books in the air at once without letting one drop.

Addition. Since the link has altered and I can't figure out where the entire piece has moved, here's a clip:

Pip Tattnal, the memorable protagonist in this Depression-era, Southern gothic coming-of-age story, flees from an impoverished orphanage a year after his younger brother’s murder there. Plagued with migraines and autistic tendencies, and gifted with an incredible memory and love of language and history, Pip is an oddity among the hobos he meets crisscrossing the country by train. He encounters cruelty and odd strangers who are kind—but he always searches for something he can’t name and only occasionally senses. Youmans’ evocative writing and colorful characters make this novel a rare pleasure that beautifully depicts the power of love.

Elsewhere in the pleased-with-itself Cooperstown, some woefully disappointed children and teens are snug in school, despite the fact that every other school round about is closed for the snowsnowsnow that descended all night and is still racing down, falling fine and fast. But neither rain nor snow stops the buses when a stalwart Canadian is your new superintendent...

The birds are in the rose canes; the feeder is magically empty once again. And those passers-by who don't have their heads down wake up to that intricate tracery of twig and bud (spring pent-up in those, I hope) and branch outlined in snow against a sky of faintly bluish milk. I am oh-so-ready for a season with flowers and no more of the winter viruses that have plagued us this year, but I will probably never get over the Southerner's romance with falling snow, and fresh snow on the boughs and shrubs.

To see samples from the three 2012 books, hop to Scribd. For more information, see tabs above...

"Like a tower"

"Journey's End" with Tretower castle by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
You can find something I wrote about this piece here.

Poem as tower

Unterecker, A Reader's Guide to William Butler Yeats (p. 107):

By staring at any poem long enough, however, by searching for all possible correlations, we can begin to apprehend details of the internal organization of poetic art. Only if we learn to read Yeats in this way--which is, in fact, a kind of inverse process of composition--can we ever understand what Yeats is trying to make out of poetry. In one sense, each of his poems is no more than a statement architecturally conceived. It is a linguistic design (and so static) which says something (and so seems to be in action.) Like a tower which thrusts up and bears down, which falls in toward a center and which is pushed out by its weight, the poem achieves a repose assembled from precarious antithetical violences.                      

Oddly,

the paradoxes of action and repose above quote reminded me of Augustine's Confessions, where he says, "But you, O Lord, are eternally at work and eternally at rest. It is not in time that you see or in time that you move or in time that you rest: yet you make what we see in time; you make time itself and the repose which comes when time ceases." Later he says, "You are for ever at rest, because you are your own repose."

To be eternally at work and eternally at rest is to have reached perfection, completion, fullness: as is sought in the making of that framework of words called a poem.

The sundry news--

Reprints are cheerful! 

Thanks to Adam Mills, managing editor of Weird Fiction Review (brain child of that energetic duo, the Vandermeers), for asking for a reprint of "An Incident at Agate Beach." The story first appeared in James A. Owen's gorgeous, short-lived Argosy Quarterly, and went on to a second life in the Northwest Passages anthology and a third in Year's Best in Fantasy and Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. An appearance in the online Weird Fiction will mark its fourth publication and be its home on the web.

I've also been asked for another reprint story for an anthology, tba.... I'm pleased about that one as well.

Thaliad

I'm still working out how to describe the new book.

My latest suggestion from Gary Dietz is that a summation of the book mention "dystopian," "story,""teens," and "in the future." Any thoughts? I find that Thaliad tends to exceed any description of it, and so any any attempt to describe it in a few words is insufficient. It's easier to depict in 500 words than in 20. So far. Also, everybody suggests not using possible "turn off" words like "apocalypse" or "epic."

My feeling is that after a while, the whole attempt feels de-natured. I never have liked summaries. If I wanted to write a book in 20 words, I would do so and be done. I tend to like other people's descriptions better than my own for that reason.

In THALIAD, Marly Youmans has written a powerful and beautiful saga of seven children who escape a fiery apocalypse----though "written" is hardly the word to use, as this extraordinary account seems rather "channeled" or dreamed or imparted in a vision, told in heroic poetry of the highest calibre. Amazing, mesmerizing, filled with pithy wisdom, THALIAD is a work of genius which also seems particularly relevant to our own time.
          --novelist Lee Smith

New page, also thanks to Gary Dietz--

Gary is a former student of mine (from another life, almost!) who gives me advice about the internet and other things. He's a creative sort and a good writer. Here he is: http://about.me/gdietz. Here I am: http://about.me/marly_youmans. Most compact. So now I have a kind of complicated signpost...

1 + 1 + 1

If you're interested in my poetry and fiction, please take a look at the pages (see tabs above) for my three 2012 books--the new Thaliad, the almost-new The Foliate Head, and the slightly less new novel A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. Every now and then publication dates collide, and those books are a challenge.