Thaliad

by Marly Youmans

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.

Thaliad is decorated throughout with original collages by the renowned Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

Genres: Poetry, Post Apocalyptic, Young Adult, Science Fiction, Fiction

120 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2012

About the author

"Youmans (pronounced like 'yeoman' with an 's' added) is the best-kept secret among contemporary American writers." --John Wilson, editor, Books and Culture

MAZE OF BLOOD (Mercer University Press, 2015.) Novel. Inspired by the life of Robert E. Howard. Profusely decorated by artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Literary / fantastic. "...A haunting tale of dark obsessions and transcendent creative fire, rendered brilliantly in Youmans' richly poetic prose." --Midori Snyder

GLIMMERGLASS (Mercer University Press, 2014) IndieFab BOTYA Finalist. Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Novel. "It’s brilliantly well-written, shockingly raw, and transportingly—sometimes confusingly (but not in a bad way)—weird. Glimmerglass shimmers on the boundaries of the real and the unreal, of poetry and prose, of the ordinary and the fantastic. It’s down to the caprice of the individual reader, therefore, to decide exactly what sort of story it’s trying to tell. It’s difficult to overstate the emotional effect that Glimmerglass has had on me. This is a beautiful, complex, moving book. Marly Youmans’s prose flows like clear water, and every image is, as Cynthia observes, “full of meaning” (p. 39)." -Tom Atherton, "Strange Horizons"

A DEATH AT THE WHITE CAMELLIA ORPHANAGE (Mercer University Press, 2012) The Ferrol Sams Award for 2012; Silver Award in fiction, The ForeWord BOTYA Awards. Novel. "It is seldom that a novel from a small university press can compete with the offerings from the big houses in New York. A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage may be the best novel this reviewer has read this year. Its quality and story-telling remind one of The Adventures of Roderick Random, Great Expectation and The Grapes of Wrath among others. The winner of the 2012 "Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction," A Death has the potential to become a classic American picaresque novel. / One wishes, however, that this novel will not get shunted into the regional box and be seen only as a Southern novel. Its themes and the power of its language, the forceful flow of its storyline and its characters have earned the right to a broad national audience." 30 July 2012 ABOUT.COM Contemporary Literature, John M. Formy-Duval.

THALIAD (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2012.) Post-apocalyptic long poem combining elements of the novel and the epic. Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. 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

THE FOLIATE HEAD (UK: Stanza Press, 2012.) Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Collection of formal poetry.

THE THRONE OF PSYCHE (Mercer University Press, 2011.) Collection of formal poetry. "Youmans is a writer of rare ability whose works will one day be studied by serious students of poetry." Greg Langley, Books editor, The Baton Rouge Advocate, October 2, 2011

VAL/ORSON (P. S. Publishing, 2009.) Novel. "Book of the Year" for 2009 Books and Culture Magazine

INGLEDOVE (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) Fantasy, y.a.

CLAIRE (Louisiana State University, 2003) Collection of poetry.

THE WOLF PIT (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.) The Michael Shaara Award. Short list, Southern Book Award.

CATHERWOOD (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.)

LITTLE JORDAN (David R. Godine, Publisher, 1995.)

Reviews

[Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Do you find it annoying when sentences go on and on and on and never seem to end and you feel like you are caught in the never-ending story because of how long they are and you just want to come up for air, you just beg for that tiny dot, that period, or even an exclamation point, that will let you finally stop and take a breath before continuing on and why doesn't the writer just put it there, is it because they want to save on ink by not using very many periods and so they just make one long sentence that should have been broken down into 8? If that sentence annoyed and confused you, you probably don't want to read this book.

Though beautiful at times, I found this book to be very frustrating. It's the story of six children who survived the apocalypse. I felt lost much of the time, drowning in words, unable to breathe. Those damned sentences were just TOO FREAKING LONG! I know, I know. It's written in verse, but still! Was there a limit on sentences? A limit on how many periods could be used in this book? Thankfully each chapter begins by telling you what it's about. Had it not been for those helpful blurbs, I wouldn't be able to tell you what the hell the book is about. The words just build and build, burying and smothering each other. I'd have enjoyed the book a lot more if I'd only read the tiny chapter headings, and no doubt would have understood it better too. If the book belonged to me, I could perhaps have gone through and broken those mile-long sentences down, inserted some periods and exclamation marks. That might have made it easier to read. I kept going with this thinking that if I could just get used to the writing (read: too-damn-long sentences), I would love it. I wanted to; some of the metaphors were absolutely breath-taking. I read this in many sittings because I just couldn't stick with it for long periods of time. It felt like a great exertion to read, and was not pleasurable in the least. Maybe I'm just lazy, maybe I just didn't "get" it. Thankfully it's not very long, only 102 pages; that is the other reason I stuck with it: I thought surely I could get through that many pages and maybe it would end up being worth it in the end (disclosure: It was not). It has been compared to The Giver, The Road, and The City of Ember, but none of those are comparisons I would use. Just because a book involves a child/children and an apocalypse does not mean it is comparable to The Giver or The Road.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goodreads friends, lend me your ears. This is one of those books that is special and unlike anything you've read before, and I'm going to urge you not only to read it, but to go out and buy it, because it's an artsy small-press book with an audience of maybe seven people in the world besides me (okay, nine — look at how many Goodreads ratings it has — pathetic!) but it's wonderful, and it's about as far from "commercial" writing as you can get.

I mean, how do you write an aggressively non-commercial YA post-apocalyptic story?

You write it as an epic poem in blank verse.

Yeah, seriously.

Year 67 After the Fire
Emma declares what she knows about the time before the fire and calls on a starlit muse, the only love she will ever have, to tell the hero's saga of The House of Thalia and Thorn.

Thaliad is a slender volume, just over a hundred pages. It is, obviously, a sort of modern-day Iliad. The wayfarers in this tale are seven middle school children, sheltered in an underground cave during a field trip when the apocalyptic fire comes. Nearly the sole survivors in the world, they travel far and then settle in a lakeshore town, and in all the years covered in this tale, they are almost alone.

This isn't a post-apocalyptic epic with cannibals and mutants and bandit warlords. It's a quieter End Times. Which makes the losses all the more poignant, because these are children, and they make mistakes, in a world that no longer forgives mistakes.

It would be pleasant then to fancy years
Unspooled in calm without more suffering
That all the children had to do was breathe
And work in sweet contentment and merriment
That comes despite the losses in a life;
I'd rather sing that changeless dream of peace...

In a hundred pages of poetry, there are only those seven children (and a handful of other encounters), yet the poet makes each of them a person who squeezes your heart. This is what good poetry does - more characterization and reader investment in a few lines than many novels manage in a hundred pages.

Thaliad is actually about coming of age and leadership and the need for community and motherhood. The titular main character, Thalia, though the youngest of the seven children, becomes their spiritual leader. She tries to keep them morally grounded, and when she loses members of her little tribe, she rages against God.

XII. THE FACE OF LIGHT

YEAR 3 AFTER THE FIRE

The peace of graves, with Thalia as raging as a storm-raked sky...
And when she reproached God, the angel with the broken face replied.

The chapter The Face of Light has obvious literary antecedents — Job and Odysseus were not the first tested by cruel deities, Thalia is not the last. Like all of her predecessors, Thalia makes a compelling if human argument:

But I am only human and a child
(Or would be child in different days than these —
Now I am something stranger than a child,
A sort of woman, child alert too soon,
And am responsible for much — too much
For humankind to manage and endure),
While You, if You exist, are God of this
And every other world and universe,
The fused creative force of artistry
That tossed this ball of Earth and fretted it
With fjord and lake and jagged rock and cloud...

And gets an answer.

Remember in the shadow of despair
What you have known; the messenger of fire
Who burned with syllables on water's skin,
For God is otherwise than what you dream
And knew your secret name before the shear
Of light, explosive kiss that birthed the stars
And juggled planets in their whirling course —
He calls your glowing name and bids you rise,
No matter if the universe is scorched
Right to the root a thousand thousand times,
For you must still be phoenix to the world.

There is definitely a religious vibe to Thaliad, but it's not an explicitly Christian fable, nor was the allegory abrasive to this atheist reader. Because in the tale of Thalia and her charge to be "phoenix to the world" there is still adventure, beauty, and, because it's the end of the world, tragedy. The world may look calm and placid, like a lake, but the world bites.

This is a beautiful work, probably destined to be obscure and underappreciated, though it should be in classrooms around the country as an example of modern and relevant poetry. So please go buy it and read it. It's one of those occasional treasures you are only likely to stumble upon by chance, and I'm pointing you right to it.

[Janet Eshenroder · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is stunning. Mesmerizing. I know I will be reading this book over and over. With each reading, I expect to fall anew in love with the power and brilliance of its lyric wisdom.

[Andreas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thaliad is a post apocalyptic tale about a group of very young children that tries to survive. It's told in verses and reads like a gospel with christian and mythological influences. Kudos to my Goodread friend David for this recommendation!

I gave myself some time to let the book sink in. Because I didn't pay too much attention to the timeline and the main characters I had to actually read it twice. The language is great and I love it that authors use this format to tell a story. The only other recent example I can think of is Sharp Teeth.

For some reason the plot didn't fully grab me and I think the main reason is the missing tempo. This became obvious towards the end when finally something DID happen with all the drama and confusion. If big words are not supported by something equally big or deep then there is the danger of disguising a shallowness with artistry and sparkle. This is a bit unfortunate because I liked the characters and the setting. The author managed to provide a different perspective by treating children as humans who are able to survive on their own.

Finally, I read parts of the book out loud. At least I tried because I found it hard to get into a flow. Beautiful passages are followed by long sentences where normal prose has been pressed into verses. By no means I am an expert in poetry so take my irritation with a grain of salt - or even better, go to this page and read the two excerpts it links to.

Conclusion: After pondering about the book for two weeks I rate it 3 stars (down-rated from 3.5) but give a positive recommendation for sheer uniqueness.

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunningly brilliant post-apocalyptic epic poetry. Youmans treads ground that is startlingly new yet feels so fitting that you have to wonder why no one else had thought of it yet. Youmans imagines not only the story of the beginning of a new world but also how the new world would tell the story: its legend and its literature. We witness the formation of a new Eve, and we hear it in the epic poetry of her descendants.

Youmans' use of the genre and form of epic poetry is just perfect. Her blank verse is gorgeous, and the allusions to other literature create a richly layered text that is more experience than story. Even in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, culture continues to build on itself. Being a modern author, Youmans also afforded me the opportunity to place myself in the position of the original hearers of epic poetry. Usually the alienness of the ancient world adds a further degree of separation between me and the tale, but hearing more modern sensibilities and descriptions of modern life within the same form helps me appreciate more what might have been the experience of Homer's original audience. The poetic language shields us from some of the violence and brutality of the times, and highlights it in other ways.

In the end, it's a work laden with hope, rich with biblical language, themes, and parallels. "I am a child but do believe the years / Have been unkind to things that matter most, / And maybe we can make a finer world, / One more alive with beauty, where the soul / Can flourish like a tree beside a stream."

If you want thought-provoking post-apocalyptic literature, I would choose this over Station Eleven or any given YA dystopia. This one is far more rewarding on countless levels.

[Chad Grissom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Epic verse about a post apocalyptic future where a new beginning rises from the ashes of violence. Good stuff.

[Sienna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marly Youmans's Thaliad is the second work of epic poetry I've read this year. (The first was Amy Brown's The Odour of Sanctity, for which I have not yet found words but hope you will read.)

It's a form I tend to approach with some trepidation, magisterial but a little aloof, confident in its pacing and path regardless of whether or not I follow. And yet the epic relies on its audience, counts on our reactions; these poems lead with head tilted to the side, watching those who follow with side-swept glances. Most of the time they see me getting caught up in the events to the exclusion of the emotion involved, getting frustrated, getting a bit... bored.

I really do like Homer. There is something magical about the linguistic structure and musicality of ancient Greek — all those intuitive accents, all those letters and words we're not really sure how to pronounce. The names! The lists! The violence! Well, not so much the violence. But classic heroic epics like The Odyssey and The Iliad have infiltrated our culture and minds in strange ways. I'm not sure how many accounts of Odysseus's long journey home to Ithaca I've read or seen or heard, but they've all contributed to how I think about him — even the video we made during freshman year of high school juxtaposing that lone cycloptic eye with the fortuitously full moon on the night of filming. Maybe this is what I'm trying to say: much of the emotion I've invested in Penelope and Telemachus and Argos derives from my own personal history with the narrative.

By contrast, Youmans's Thaliad presents an unfamiliar-recognizable epic, marrying our penchant for not-long-from-now post-apocalypticism with the old-to-the-point-of-timelessness. She tells us how the world ends and how it begins again. Our heroes are children, our narrator a bard charged with preserving remnants of the end and commemorating the beginning. She gives us accidental glimpses of herself, her fears, her hopes, her faith. She gives us love and she gives us a sense of horror.

You see, Emma, our narrator, counts — she counts down. And these are eleven-year-olds. They get older — we've grown older, however young we still feel — but we read their youth in these pages, and it breaks hearts. Meet Gabriel:

He huddled on the pavement, sunk in tears,
And only jumped up, pleading at the glass,
When laughing faces looked from high on him.
I'd like to say that they relented then,
Embraced the boy and let him in to stay,
One cruel lesson roughly taught and learned:
Events went otherwise. They drove away.

They drove away! And left that little boy
Alone with bridges, river, blowing ash,
Immensity. He was eleven, a child
Beloved and seldom left alone in rooms.
The landscape must have wallowed round his head,
Wavering, frightful-strange, making its threats
In symbol language of a mighty sky
That promised death, destruction, reign of fire;
In symbol language of the puissant stream
That had been thicked and porridged by the ash...

I hadn't anticipated the depth of feeling this early passage provoked, nor the way that emotion shifted and swelled over the course of the Thaliad's twenty-four short sections. This is all to say that I'm grateful to Gabriel, to the twins, Alexandra and Elaine, to Fay, to Samuel and Ran, to Thalia, smallest of them all, to Emma, who carries the weight of the past in words, and to Youmans, who forced me to reassess how epic poems might make me — and you, and everyone else bothering to listen — feel. And for making me want to read more. It's the perfect way to end a year of reading.

[MonumentToDecency · Rating 4 out of 5]

I tripped over this while looking for some original modern epic poetry and, by the Dogs of Furdom, I'm so glad I did. I had to order a physical copy, as an e-version isn't available, and it now sits quite proudly on my bookshelves.

This is one of those books I want to recommend to everyone but value far to much to lend anyone my copy for fear of never seeing it again.

I want to say this is beautifully written but it's more like gorgeous architecture. Constructed with a passion for words, with a passion for real storytelling, with a passion for the lyrical; Thaliad is a journey into another time and place, with memorable characters and beautiful exposition. Definitely worth the journey.

My rating: 4 purple shirts out of 5.

[Elise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely spectacular.

[James Brush · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, beautiful and haunting. I look forward to rereading this someday

[curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Completely enthralling. A post-apocalyptic epic poem in beautiful, pristine meter and awash with lush, vibrant imagery...what's not to love??? Just an amazing read.

[Patricia Sullivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A powerful post-apocalyptic story told in a poetry form. Surreal, heartbreaking, and beautifully written. A "not-for-everyone" book as there were a few unbelievable moments, but otherwise I was invested in the tale.

[Rouchswalwe · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hard journey. What it takes and what it takes from you. But what does it give? Ms. Youmans explores such a journey in blank verse. The story is wonderous and I'm very happy to have experienced this tale. It is vivid and contemporary and timeless and wise. I know I will want to read it again.