Although she has many more achievements, Beth is probably best known to readers of Tone Deaf through her blog, The Cassandra Pages. Click HERE for details of the book's availability.
Two contributors will also be familiar. Marly Youmans, published poet and novelist, and a regular commenter on Lucy's blog, has three poems, notably The Annunciation Appears in a Painting by Andrew Wyeth. It starts thus:
Shadows from the angel's wing suffuse
The brittle grass with gold where Wyeth sinks
Into a patch of snow...
While Natalie d'Arbeloff, blogger, artist, polyglot, and Tone Deaf commenter, has translated the Brazilian poet, Vinicius de Moraes, ending:
When I awoke
I smelled of jasmine
An angel was scattering petals
Over me...
The levels elsewhere are equally high but I urge you to find out for yourselves. All contributors bar one are women and it's an unbelievable honour to be the lone male. My verse appeared in Tone Deaf. Click HERE
Hardline Hope, a novel (3704 words).
Lindsay wasn’t even sure Jenson’s prettiness would be worth the effort. Eating out with him, opposite, over a table, would theoretically be a pleasure; a relaxed inspection of his eyelashes. But not really. She’d be sharing his eyelashes with Jenson himself. For Jenson knew he was strong on eyelashes.
Bed? There’d be a mirror, surely.
Fancies me? “Not as much as he fancies himself,” she said to Bronwyn.
Congratulations on being the lone man! I've often read your comments with interest. I'll be giving the book to a lot of local friends, so your thread-nipping Mary in the oil-lamp light will soon be wandering around central New York.
ReplyDeleteMy initial copy just arrived after suffering trials on the way (really, Mr./Ms. Postman!) and is pinned down under a fat book about Fra Angelico (seemed appropriate), but I shall take it out this afternoon and enjoy again.
Interesting to see which one of mine you liked best. For Beth, I think it was "Iconography of an Imaginary Medieval Painting."
Marly: In New York, you say. Fine, so long as it's not Philadelphia, a city I never got along with. And I suspect the feeling was mutural
ReplyDeleteMy thanks for the comment. I skimmed your blog a couple of times and stayed away; it looked major league and as far as verse was concerned I was sitting on the bench in Palookaville, still learning my trade, coached by the late Joe Hyam (né Plutarch) and Lucy. And I'm still very much learning, of course, since I started far too late. Mary was a step up from the Shakespearean sonnets I didn't dare disdain. Structure was my comfort blanket. Occasionally one gets lucky.
I could have picked either of the other two, both fine poems. But a journalistic imperative prevailed. I needed a quote, it had to be short (my posts are limited to 300 words); with Wyeth, snipping off the first 2½ lines seemed more like surgery and less like butchery. See how humdrum I am at heart. And why I confess to verse not poetry.
Thanks for coming by anyway! As I said elsewhere, I've often enjoyed your comments in other people's blogs--and I enjoyed your poem. And I have humdrum blogging motives all the time, life being (like newspaper life) so very busy.
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