Thaliad - Softcover

Youmans, Marly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0986690937 ISBN 13: 9780986690938

Publisher: Phoenicia Publishing, 2012

Synopsis

"Amazing, mesmerizing, filled with pithy wisdom, THALIAD is a work of genius which also seems particularly relevant to our own time." --Lee Smith Thaliad, a book-length epic poem written in blank verse, tells the story of a group of children, survivors of an apocalypse, who make an arduous journey of escape and then settle in a deserted rural town on the shores of a beautiful lake. There, they must learn how to survive, using tools and knowledge they discover in the ruins of the town, but also how to live together. At the heart of the story is the young girl Thalia, who gradually grows to womanhood, and into the spiritual role for which she was destined. Following in the great tradition of narrative poetry, Thaliad tells a gripping story populated with sharply-drawn, memorable characters whose struggles illuminate the complexity of human behavior from its most violent to most noble. At the same time, through its accessible language and style, the epic presents wholly contemporary questions about what is necessary not only for physical survival, but for the flourishing of the human spirit.

About this title

From the Author

Thaliad is a particularly beautiful object, having been produced in collaboration with stellar designer Elizabeth Adams and major artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins (Clive and I also worked together on the poetry collection, The Foliate Head, and his work has appeared on the covers of some of my other books, both poetry and fiction.) The physical book pleases me enormously as a memento of friendship and time spent with other artists, joined from three countries by the magic of the internet.

I hope that people who love poetry will find Thaliad, but I do not think this tale bars those who are primarily readers of fiction. The narrative is written in iambic pentameter, or blank verse, and English speakers tend to talk in a way that is roughly iambic. So I hope that people who love grand, epic adventures and stories in which much (tragic, joyful, vigorous, and surprising) happens and a world is transformed will discover Thaliad and then share it with others. Should you be one of those who does so, Lady Word of Mouth and I will frisk and be grateful!

From the Back Cover

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

A remarkable and daring work of interstitial art: an epic poem of the new future than demands you read it on its own terms, and rewards you greatly for it.
More to the point, it's believable: an artifact of a dystopian future that combines the best of epic poetry with modern fiction.
By turns funny, insightful and deeply moving. I'd love to hear it read aloud. --novelist Ellen Kushner 

. . . 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. --novelist Midori Snyder, "The Sublime Collaboration of Author Marly Youmans with Artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins: Thaliad," from In the Labyrinth
Marly Youmans has always had a flair for the mythological, but it is new to add the apocalyptic. Thaliad marries the end of the world to its new beginning, and does so by joining children's literature with adult literature. The City of Ember, The Giver, The Road, The Tempest: Youmans merges genre with the symbolic truths about our lives, and comes up a long blank verse poem that speaks to suffering and hope, to cruelty and to resurrection. If we feel that the world has been lost, Youmans reminds us that "God is otherwise than what you dream / And knew your secret name before the shear / Of light, explosive kiss that birthed the stars. . . . / He calls your glowing name and bids you rise." --Kim Bridgford, poet, director of West Chester Poetry Conference 
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. --poet Damian Walford Davies (Wales)

Edition details

• Publisher: Phoenicia Publishing
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0986690937
• ISBN 13: 9780986690938
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 120