pre-order Thaliad

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From today you can pre-order Marly Youman’s new title Thaliad from Phoenicia Publishing. I’ve had a preview of the work that Elizabeth Adams has done on its design, and I can promise you that the book is going to be very beautiful.

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Praise for Thaliad.

…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.” 
-Midori Snyder, from In the Labyrinth

Daringly, Marly Youmans’ Thaliad takes the blank verse epic into post-apocalyptic territory. In its reflections on group memory and foundational myth, this is a poem that relishes the ways in which the modern teller – whether the bard Emma or Youmans herself – fashions fragile new worlds in the act of rehearsing the old. Above all, perhaps, Thaliad is a plea against violence in all its forms; a call – articulated in different voices throughout – to protect not only the wellsprings of human love, but also those of the natural world, whose ‘simple golden wedding’ we may yet experience, as long as our memory is sufficiently long, and our desire for a different future strong enough.
-Damian Walford Davies, poet and co-director of the Centre for Romantic Studies, 
Aberystwyth University, Wales

 

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. 
-Lee Smith, award-winning author of 16 books of fiction

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I made seventeen decorations for the interior of Thaliad, and these are scattered throughout the book as the frontispiece, a decorative border, character portraits and chapter headings and tailpieces. I also designed the cover, producing the image and lettering from painted paper collage.

This is my fourth collaboration with Marly on her books. Previously I’ve made covers for her novel Val Orson, and two volumes of poetry, The Throne of Psyche and The Foliate Head. She contributed a chapter to last year’s monograph Clive Hicks-Jenkins, published by Lund Humphries, and was one of the writers included in the anthology The Book of Ystwyth: six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins.