For whatever the land you possess, whether it be where sand
And gravel lie barren and dead, or where fruits grow heavy
In rich moist ground; whether high on a steep hillside,
Easy ground in the plain or rough among sloping valleys—
Wherever it is, your land cannot fail to produce
Its native plants. If you do not let laziness clog
Your labor, if you do not insult with misguided efforts
The gardener’s multifarious wealth, and if you do not
Refuse to harden or dirty your hands in the open air
Or to spread whole baskets of dung on the sun-parched soil—
then, you may rest assured, your soil will not fail you.
(trans. Payne)

In the March and April dankness, I followed Walahfrid’s example—and today I reaped the year’s first harvest from my little realm of dirt.

I checked to see if Walahfrid had anything to say about radishes. Indeed he did:

RAFANUM

Hic rafanum radice potens latoque comarum
Tegmine sublatum extremus facit ordo videri
Cuius amara satis quatientem viscera tussim
Mansa premit radix, triti quoque seminis haustus
Eiusdem vitio pestis persaepe medetur.

Here’s a loose and hasty translation into pseudo-Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse:

THE RADISH

Powerfully rooted,   it raises the vaults
Of its broadening leaves    and lies waiting,
The radish you find   in the final row.
Its flesh-root shortens    that shattering cough,
Or grind up a draught    and drink the seeds:
That dose often    will do the trick too.

Walahfrid died in A.D. 849 while trying to cross the Loire. He was only in his early thirties, but he seems to have grown to prefer plants to politics—an insight rare in places of power, then and now.

(The garden in June 2012.)

Wal-Mart stores, he notes, are “probably one of the most trafficked interior spaces in the world.” In the tall, open, cathedral-like ceilings of Wal-Mart’s big-box stores, he sees parallels to church interiors of old.

“There is something in us that aspires to some kind of transcendence,” he told me back in February. “And as we’ve culturally turned from religious things, we’ve turned our transcendence to acquisition and satisfying desires.”

I don’t buy the comparison. Having warehouse-high ceilings doesn’t make Wal-Mart “cathedral-like.” What does make a big box store akin to a Gothic cathedral is more banal: Look up, and you’ll see that the architectural supports in both buildings aren’t covered or obscured. (As for transcendence, Americans seek that elsewhere: sports, Vegas, the movies, and occasionally—mirabile dictu—at actual houses of worship.)

Still, artists and writers love to cast gigantic stores as misbegotten cathedrals. Five minutes on Google turns up unflattering “cathedrals of consumerism” quips in countless news stories and scholarly articles—as well as the work of artist Michelle Muldrow, who paints the interiors of big box stores for her “Cathedrals of Desire” series. Muldrow outlines her goals in a genre that would have vexed even the most patient of medieval exegetes, the artist’s statement:

“Cathedrals of Desire” investigates the experience of the repulsion and seduction of the American landscape. This new body of work incorporates the landscape painting tradition with awe-inducing elements of cathedrals to evoke a contemporary sublime. My paintings of big box stores are intended to elicit fear and awe at the vast American consumer landscape.

[...]

This series is inspired by the theories of Edmund Burke’s treatise on the sublime and its relationship with terror. This, paired with the concept of the divine power of the sublime, heavily influenced my depiction of these consumer spaces as Cathedrals of Desire.

[...]

The obtrusive massive structures built with no attempt at aesthetic beauty reveal the most naked of American consumer desires. The language of American desire can be reduced to vignettes of patio furniture and gingham covered tables set like small picnics.

I like Muldrow’s art, and she’s smart to turn her landscape-painter’s eye toward the vast places where Americans shop—but nothing about “Icon,” her painting of two shopping carts against a jumbled background, actually evokes icons, or implies anything about icons through their absence, or says anything about the absence of icons through the presence of shopping carts. While her lovely “Altar in Orange” captures the bright, asymmetrical beauty of an unmanned Target check-out line, the painting doesn’t fit its title: Altars aren’t like box store check-out stations in location, function, design, decoration, number, or sacrality.

Artists and critics have been down this aisle before. Émile Zola called the grand arcades of 19th-century Paris “cathedrals of commerce,” and Walter Benjamin “spent the final 13 years of his life…trying to fashion a theory of modernity based on the arcades.” A century ago, the Woolworth Building, one of countless American skyscrapers inspired by the Gothic, was approvingly dubbed the “Cathedral of Commerce.” By now, the comparison is cliché. It flatters medieval cathedrals by making stores seem all the more crass by contrast—but what a limited view of cathedrals.

Unlike Wal-Marts and Targets, cathedrals were each architecturally unique. They were shrines where people hoped and prayed but rarely sated their earthly desires. They were religious institutions whose spiritual offerings didn’t cater to market demands. They were political centers overseen by men who wielded far more local power than any store manager. As distinctive hubs of pilgrimage and tourism, they attracted seekers from straunge strondes in ways no standardized big-box store could, drawing worshippers from all strata of society.

One point of these art projects is to suggest that shopping is America’s religion, and a degraded one at that—but isn’t it possible that rural shoppers at big-box stores like Wal-Mart are more likely than their countrymen to attend actual religious services and distinguish between shopping and praying? Why focus on modest people who go to unfancy buildings to buy low-priced stuff that meets their earthly needs? What about wealthier people who’d never set foot in Wal-Mart but do make pseudo-religious pilgrimages to ornate boutiques to overpay for luxury goods based on a label or a name?

Two centuries after the Hudson River School painters begged Americans to adore the New World, our artists still seek the cachet of medieval European precedents. Medievalism runs rampant in America, and for six years this blog has chased it, from Gothic synagogues in Savannah to killer queens in New Jersey, from Cajun jousters and the saints of New Orleans to the gargoyles of Perth Amboy, from Oxbridge rivalries on the Potomac to dragons and Vikings at Maryland resorts, from late-blooming scholars on postage stamps to courtly love on General Hospital—but sometimes medievalism just isn’t there, or it thrives only in a critic’s misperception.

Let’s kill this “cathedrals of commerce” cliché. A vast, bustling megastore has little in common with a medieval cathedral either socially or architecturally. The wonders that landscape painters like Michelle Muldrow find at Target—man-made vistas of color and light—are worth seeing for what they are; don’t let Gothic spires warp the view.

If you think there ought to be at least one good poem about the horrific life of the tomato hornworm, then you’re going to like Bruce Taylor. In No End in Strangeness, Taylor shows that even poems of personal reflection need not begin or end with the self, and that there’s much to be learned from peering at bread mold or using a microscope to marvel, as van Leeuwenhoek did, at the zoological wonders in backyard muck. (That poem, “Little Animals,” justified my purchase of this 2011 collection.) Taylor isn’t necessarily a “science poet,” but he also doesn’t indulge that romantic urge to dismiss or dream away technology, and I like that his poetry sent me to YouTube to look at digenea, rotaria, and amoeba for myself. (Check out a review of No End in Strangeness in the Contemporary Poetry Review and a nice appreciation of “Little Animals” by Anita Lahey.)

I first knew Alan Sullivan through the lively, form-conscious translation of Beowulf he published with his partner Tim Murphy, but the Psalms of King David were clearly the work of his life. While dying of cancer, Sullivan partnered with an Israeli textual scholar to translate the Davidic psalms with a particular emphasis on replicating the alliteration and meter of the originals. The resulting poems are lucid, lyrical, and fresh; through Sullivan, King David sings anew. Read selections from the Sullivan Psalter in this review and remembrance by poet Maryann Corbett, and don’t miss Sullivan’s famous villanelle about cancer.

Part Virgil, part “Thundarr the Barbarian,” Frederick Turner’s The New World is a classical epic about an America yet to be—and holy crow, is it fun. Picture this: It’s 400 years in the future, and North America has evolved in bizarre ways. Brutal mutants rule formerly prominent cities (now known as Riots), and religious fanatics threaten the borders of the world’s last civilized place: an enlightened, chivalric, polytheistic republic based in Ohio. According to Dana Gioia, when Turner first published his epic in 1985, it ”was met with bewilderment or abuse by academic commentators, even while it earned high praise in nonacademic journals.” Love triangles! Lofty language! Laser swords! Turner does a great job of fusing classical epic with science fiction, and while The New World is great fun, it’s also far more moving and beautiful than I’d expected. Late in the epic, there’s a passage about pregnancy and childbirth that really shows off Turner’s poetic chops; it’s one of countless images that will stick with you long after you put the book aside.

For half a century, autodidact and occasional actor Christopher Logue rallied all the gimmicks of modern poetry to craft a loose, idiomatic version of Homer’s Iliad. “[I]t’s some of the best poetry being written in English today,” wrote Jim Lewis at Slate in 2003, “and it should be read widely and with great pleasure by anyone still interested in the art of verse.” Literally irreverent, Logue freed himself from the tyranny of the Homeric text through one curious advantage: his ignorance of ancient Greek. Instead, he based his still-unfinished poem on English translations published between 1720 and 1950. His Homer—currently collected in three separate volumes—includes scenes that aren’t in the Iliad; at one point, he cribs a passage from Paradise Lost. If you like the idea of blatant anachronisms perfectly deployed—Ajax likened to Rommel alongside references to helicopters and camera angles—then start with War Music. This is exciting, engaging stuff. (I wrote about Logue after his death in December 2011.)

Agha Shahid Ali raised the profile of the ghazal in the English-speaking world. Not every poem in Call Me Ishmael Tonight hews strictly to the Persian form, with its unusual use of couplet-based rhyme within, and not at the end of, every other line, but Ali knows when to be flexible, and he never fails to strike strange, memorable chords. Some poets gripe that ghazals are tricky to write, but there’s an impressionistic quality to them that should excite Westerners: A ghazal’s couplets each tell tiny stories that don’t add up to a coherent narrative but do convey a consistent wistfulness that registers somewhere between heartbreak and hope. Ali adored the ghazal, and he makes the form look easy—even as he uses it to document a creeping awareness of his impending death.

Most fantasy fans know Robert E. Howard as the pulp writer who invented Conan the Barbarian, but he was also a prolific poet. Some of his verse served as epigraphs to his own stories, a few poems appeared in magazines like Weird Tales, and most of it was never published at all. Howard’s Collected Poetry is already out of print—I wrote about it a couple years back—but this hearty Selected Poems should be enough for nearly anyone. As you’d expect of a writer in his late twenties who wrote thousands of poems, Howard composed plenty of clunkers, but his best works are loud, brawny fun. We’ve forgotten that poetry need not be about flowers and personal reflection; Howard knew that it’s also the province of Satanic wizards, voodoo queens, blood-flecked Vikings, Puritan swordsmen, and barbarous hordes. He ought to be “the poet laureate of restless boys, whose lives these days lack poetry, but who, as Howard comprehended, crave it more than most.”

“The issues, however, remain, and no modern reader can quite escape a sense, once again, that the medieval world with all its cruelty and fanaticism has not been entirely buried, is all too capable of returning to haunt us. Medievalisms remain dangerous, and dangerously vital: that is one reason why they require careful and dispassionate study, of the kind they too rarely receive inside or outside the academy.”

Eliza Shapiro, The Daily Beast, April 19, 2013:

Amir Temur, also known as Tamerlane, was a Central Asian ruler and warlord who lived in the 14th and 15th centuries. Scholars estimate that his military campaigns throughout Central Asia, Africa, Europe, and the modern Middle East killed about 17 million people, or 5 percent of the world’s population at the time.

Identifying strongly with Mongol culture, Tamerlane wanted to restore the empire of Genghis Khan and conquered the modern nations of Iran, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Syria, India, and southern regions of Russia. He was a devout Muslim who referred to himself as the “Sword of Islam,” even though he razed many of the Islamic world’s greatest cities at the time.

Although Tamerlane died six centuries ago, his legacy still carries enormous weight throughout Central Asia. The Tsarnaev brothers are Chechen, and Tamerlan, the older of the two, fled Chechnya with his family in the early 1990s to escape the bloodshed that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. He came to the United States with his family in either 2002 or 2003 under refugee status from Kyrgyzstan.

“To say Tamerlane evokes mixed reaction across Central Asia would be an understatement,” Justin Marozzi, author of Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World, told the Daily Beast. “Respected as a national hero in Uzbekistan, site of his imperial capital of Samarkand, he is regarded with loathing—with good reason—by the country’s neighbors, who remember, more than 600 years after his death, the numerous outrages he committed against them.”

Tom Shippey, Studies in Medievalism XVII (2009), p. 52:

“There are . . . many medievalisms in the world, and some of them are as safe as William Morris wallpaper: but not all of them.”

The ride along Route 35 was as heartbreaking as I expected, but Jersey attitude is a universal constant. On a sunny April weekend, one of the surviving chunks of the Seaside Heights boardwalk was so busy that a carny let down his guard to marvel at how “jumpin’” it was.

Folks were there to wander around, chow down on pizza and pork roll—and yes, to gawk. If you’re from New Jersey, then someplace you love was likely destroyed.

For example, beyond this sign, there used to be a 200-foot pier.

I’m not about to share gratuitous disaster photos; this blog is about finding medievalism. Even in the aftermath of Sandy, Dame Medievalism staggers drunkenly up and down the Jersey Shore—as long as you know where to look.

Although the storm wiped out Casino Pier in Seaside Heights, its jolly streetside facade survives, keeping out the curious…

…while across the street, a Viking watches and waits.

At Point Pleasant Beach, Jenkinson’s Boardwalk is mostly restored. The tiki bar is open, the zeppoles smell terrific, and the kiddie amusements are whirring away—including this iconic ride that invites you to fling yourself inside a dragon’s gaping chest cavity.

Up the road in Long Branch, my new favorite building defied Sandy: the Church of the Presidents, an 1879 masterpiece of carpenter Gothic that highlights what the Jersey Shore has always been known for: restraint and good taste.

Up in Rumson, on a charmingly landscaped plot around 1,500 feet from the beach, St. George’s-by-the-River looks like a nice, straightforward Episcopal church…

…until you realize that from one corner of its tower looms a gargoyle—the only such monster I can recall with an identifiable, even incontrovertible sex.

This weekend I saw awful sights: oceanside streets still buried in sand, bungalows tossed into piles and smashed, and one of my favorite childhood places destroyed. I also saw residents busy with shovels and saws, workers rebuilding boardwalks with heroic speed, and locals who want the world to know they’re very much open for business. At the risk of irreverence, all I can say is that if a topless gargoyle from 1908 can survive Sandy, the Jersey Shore will too, with the tenacity of medieval myth. It’s amazing what endures.

In 2009, after promoting my Charlemagne book and working on projects for other people, I was word-weary and exhausted. To make writing fun again—without worrying about marketability, editors’ impressions, or other people’s needs—I started composing poems inspired by the gargoyles and grotesques that adorn my friendly neighborhood neo-Gothic cathedral.

Light verse! Sonnets! Strange soliloquies and songs! Translations from Latin and German! Three years and more than fifty poems later, the folks at the cathedral graciously gave me permission to show their typically publication-shy beasties in print. The resulting book, Looking Up: Poems from the National Cathedral Gargoyles, is now available at the cathedral gift shop, through Amazon, or (most profitably) directly from me. I’ll donate 75 percent of the net profits to the National Cathedral to help repair damage from the 2011 earthquake. It’s my way of saying thank-you for the many quiet afternoons I’ve spent on the cathedral grounds. (Browse the first drafts of 51 of the 53 poems, and learn more about the book here.)

In 2007, I translated the 15th-century romance “The Taill of Rauf Coilyear,” a 972-line Middle Scots poem about the kerfuffle that ensues when Charlemagne, separated from his entourage by a snowstorm at Christmastime, seeks refuge in the home of a proud and irascible collier (a sort of medieval Tommy Saxondale). Combining folklore motifs with burlesque humor and elements of chansons and chivalric romances, “Rauf Coilyear” is a lively but rarely-read tale of courtesy, hospitality, and knighthood. To my knowledge, it’s also the only medieval romance in which Charlemagne totally gets slapped in the face.

The translation was an experiment: I wanted to see if I could imitate all 75 of the original poem’s tricky rhyming, alliterative, 13-line stanzas in a translation that was both readable and entertaining. (Check out “The Taill of Rauf Coilyear” in its original Middle Scots to see what I was up against.)

The Tale of Charlemagne and Ralph the Collier is now available through Amazon as a $10 paperback. There’s also an e-book specially formatted for the Kindle. (To get a taste of the translation, sample this low-res PDF of the first few pages.)

No one else has translated “Rauf Coilyear” into rhyming, alliterative, modern English verse, and I doubt anyone else will be nutty enough to try—so whether you’re a longtime reader of this blog, a student of medieval literature, a fan of old-fashioned poetic formalism, or a collector of truly obscure manifestations of Charlemagniana, I hope you’ll find this translation a satisfying read. Despite what Mamillus claimed, sometimes a sad tale isn’t best for winter after all.

In 2001 I had been stuck. The success of Beowulf and the Critics was combining with the difficulty I was having in putting together my first monograph on Anglo-Saxon to pull me away from the field. Kalamazoo that year had been a big, depressing disappointment. What other people seemed to find exciting did nothing for me, and the terrible job market had caused a number of my friends to leave academia altogether. The intellectual spark had gone out.  Anglo-Saxon studies was following a path that led only to insignificant but all-consuming quibbling. The field was entangled in miserable thickets of personal and institutional politics, and those who–through the positions they occupied, if not the work they were no longer doing–should have led were instead dissipating the hard-won intellectual inheritance of our titanic forebears (not on debauchery, more’s the pity, but on orthodoxy, groveling, scheming). It was just a radical change from my feelings of immense excitement at ISAS ’95 at Stanford or ’97 at Palermo or ’99 at Notre Dame. I wanted out, to be away from this whole field that I had loved so much.

I clearly remember sitting on the floor of O’Hare airport at 6:30 a.m. on Sunday morning exhausted (having gone to bed at 3:00 and gotten up at 4:30), bored, and with a five-hour wait ahead of me, thinking that this was going to be my last Kalamazoo. I would focus on Tolkien, get my tenure in a couple years, and spend my energies on my 1-year-old daughter.

What changed Drout’s life and restored his faith in his field? A book about what he calls “[p]ossibly the most boring set of ‘texts’ in the history of earth.” Whether you’re a scholar, an academic refugee, or a writer itching with doubt, check out Drout’s tribute to a scholar whose meticulous research and logical arguments gave his own work new direction—and “brought the dead to life.”

We popped down to Staunton this weekend to see The Two Noble Kinsmen, an adaptation of Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” by John Fletcher with an assist from William Shakespeare. The play is supposedly “deeply flawed,” but a dozen actors (who directed themselves) made it engaging and sharp. They earned a standing ovation—and propelled the Canterbury pilgrims through the 17th century and onto the sidewalks of a small Virginia town.

With my own ful devout corage, I did what I do in any new place: I hunted for further medievalism. After good finds in other Virginia towns—Williamsburg, Richmond, Annandale, and the imaginary Swallow Barn—I knew Staunton would come through, and it did, just up the hill from the theater.

Welcome to Thornrose Cemetery, designed by Staunton’s own Thomas Jasper Collins, who built eclectic homes and churches throughout his adoptive hometown.

Although Collins never visited Europe, he did (according to James Madison University) study Gothic Revival architecture in Baltimore, Richmond, and Norfolk. Just inside the cemetery gates is a monument to his medievalism: a stocky little keep.

When Collins went medieval by the cemetery walls, his work was striking, if too weighty to be whimsical.

Collins also designed the lovely Effinger family mausoleum, which looks like a stone drawer pulled from the facade of a Gothic cathedral.

One of the weirder corners of Thornrose leads to a monument to the Confederate dead. There’s good reason to associate faux-medieval castle ramparts with Southern chivalry, but look:

A huge neoclassical urn! A chuppah with square stone pillars and Tudor half-timbering! Civil War artillery! The committee-driven incoherence is wonderfully American.

Like Staunton itself, Thornrose grows ever more eclectic. Its wind-worn headstones aren’t lurid or sad; there’s a matter-of-factness here that harks back to The Two Noble Kinsmen:

This world’s a Citty full of straying Streets,
And Death’s the market place, where each one meetes.

A few blocks away, on a gloomy Sunday morning, you might spot the fellows who play Chaucer’s knights leaning into freezing rain and muttering lines that have only been heard from a handful of actors in 400 years. Later, on stage, they’ll offer up a fine reminder for the week before Easter: not everything that dies is gone for good.

Lonesome Dove. The Godfather. Roots. Each book or movie they floated was a lengthy, multigenerational take on an ethnic or regional experience. Other students brought up Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, and one of them argued, with rare passion, for Stephen King’s Dark Tower/Gunslinger series. In the end, no one was satisfied. Ours, they sighed, is an epic-less nation.

But if we don’t currently have an epic, the people who will live here someday may. That’s the premise of Marly Youmans’ eerie and beautiful Thaliad, a 24-book poem about seven children who survive a fiery apocalypse—and how one of them becomes the founding matriarch of a lakeside tribe in upstate New York.

Recounted 67 years later by Emma, a teenaged librarian who roves the wastes with sword and gun in search of unrescued books, the Thaliad fuses several out-of-vogue elements—formalist verse, narrative poetry, classical epic—to a familiar science-fiction trope. What grows from this grafting is a weird, fresh, magical thing: the story of a new world rooted in the ingenuity and optimism of ”one who / Was ordinary as a stone or stem / Until the fire came and called her name.”

Like any classical epic, the Thaliad states its purpose: “to make from these paper leaves / A book to tell and bind the hardest times / That ever were in all of history.” Emma even invokes a muse, but in a nice teen-angst twist, she prays for inspiration from the dream husband she’s sure she’ll never have. “And so I am now married to the quill,” she vows with the melodramatic certainty of youth, recording the origins of her people in a tale that glows with mystical visions, prophetic messengers, and the hard bargain of a divine covenant.

What makes the Thaliad most compelling and real is a certain cheekiness in Marly Youmans’ choice of setting. The children who survive the unexplained holocaust migrate north, as Youmans did, and end up where she lives: Cooperstown, New York, with its nearby Glimmerglass Historic District and Kingfisher Tower, a (yes!) neo-Gothic folly on Otsego Lake. What fantasist hasn’t looked around and wondered what familiar streets and settings might someday become? In that sense, Thaliad recalls Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, and Youmans is at least as skilled as Le Guin at using mythic elements to solidify and universalize a story, from hints of Beowulf in the raising of funeral mounds to fateful echoes of Ophelia and the Lady of Shalott.

Because epic must be larger than life, Thalia and her fellow children are preternaturally articulate, as is their historian-poet, sometimes in amusing ways. When Emma praises Thalia’s ancestry, we learn that her mother was a doctor, while her father

           was unknown, donor of seed,
Impregnator without shape, a formless
Father of the mind who though a mortal
Receives immortal honors from our kind.

By crafting lofty language to describe an immaculate scientific conception, Youmans reminds Thaliad readers that we’re seeing everything in this poem through the eyes of a teenager and the distorting lens of epic—but also that we’re half-blind to the wonders of our own world. Three generations on, Emma doesn’t think much of us:

Then beauty was abolished by the state
And colleges of learning stultified,
Hewing to a single strand of groupthink.
It was a time bewitched, when devils ruled,
When ancient ice fields melted, forests burned,
When sea tossed up its opal glitterings
Of unknown fish and dragons of the deep,
When giant moth and demon rust consumed,
And every day meant more and more to buy.
Some people here and there lived otherwise,
But no one asked them for any wisdom,
And no one looked to their authority,
For none they had, nor were they like to have
The same—no one expects the end of things
To come today, although it must some day,
And so no one expected the great flares…

Fortunately, Youmans doesn’t rest on easy social criticism. Through unsettling depictions of cruelty, negligence, and loss, she argues that despair in times of horror is a choice, not an inevitability. Even as the Thalians struggle to preserve scraps of civilization, the stars over Cooperstown offer another chance for humanity to get things right. Keen to reinvent the constellations, Thalian poets gaze at a sky

Where unfamiliar constellations rule
A dazzling zodiac—the Nine-tailed Cat,
The Throne of Fire, the Fount of Anguishing,
Un-mercy’s Seat. I might go cruelly on,
But I have brooded for too long on fall
And desolation, hidden history
Of world’s end, thing unwritten in the books,
Its causes and its powers scribed on air
And seen out of a corner of the eye
Or not at all. Better to dream and say
That sparking zodiac shows sympathy
For trial and weariness, presenting Hope
In Silver Feathers, Gabriel in Light,
The Mother’s Arms, the Father’s Sailing Boat,
The Seven Triumphant Against the Waste.

To Youmans, whether you like what you see when you look heavenward depends entirely on what you want to see.

Youmans’ hopeful epic has a recent precedent: Frederick Turner’s brilliant science-fiction poem The New World, in which the learned citizens of a 24th-century Ohio republic fend off fanatics in bordering lands. Maybe two poets don’t represent a trend, but a few clever souls have begun to look beyond short, personal lyrics to rediscover the potential of narrative poetry. Christopher Logue’s retelling of Homer is one of the coolest long poems in decades, and Dana Gioia’s most recent book includes a ghost story in syllabic verse.

By writing an epic, Youmans is endorsing a poetic renaissance that has its detractors. Since the 1980s, dyspeptic critics have argued that neoformal poetry is too obsessed with poetry itself (at the expense, they say, of looking out at the world) and that neoformalism “decontextualizes” poetry. Of course, people who point out the same problem with the past century of visual art get dismissed as reactionary cranks, so I’m content to mutter “de gustibus…” and move on. Youmans’ poem is a call to restore old and beautiful forms of literature—that’s what Emma, librarian and historian, literally does when she speaks of the past:

It was the age beyond the ragged time
When all that matters grew disorderly—
When artworks changed, expressive, narcissist,
And then at last became just tedious,
A beetle rattling in a paper cup,
Incessant static loop of nothingness,
When poems sprang and shattered into shards,
And then became as dull as newsprint torn
And rearranged in boredom by a child
Leaning on a window seat in the rain.

Even so, the Thaliad isn’t just literature about literature. By building a plausible world in fiction, Youmans, like any good science-fiction writer, makes us more aware of the weirdness of the real world, where we should look for life in all sorts of seemingly dead things:

We found a sourwood tree that had been killed
By something, but the leaves still drooped in place,
Though every one had faded into brown.
When we came closer, leaves burst into wings—
The tree was green, the death was butterflies,
Alive and pouring like a waterfall
But upside down from us…

Not remotely a formalist novelty, the Thaliad is a remarkable book about surviving a crisis of faith.

Although the Thaliad runs only 102 pages, it’s a rich poem, and I couldn’t find room in this post for half of my notes. Detecting influences ranging from Milton to Cavafy to A.A. Milne, I reacted just as Dale Favier did:

But having finished, I turn at once to the beginning, to read it again, which is of course what one always does with a genuine epic. They begin in the middle of things because they understand that everything is in the middle of things: they’re structured as a wheel, and its first revolution is only to orient ourselves.

If they’re willing to take a chance, fantasy and science-fiction fans and even the “young adult” crowd might all find much to love here. The Thaliad is rare proof that verse need not be difficult or obscure—and that even now, narrative poetry can still leave readers, like Thalian children eyeing strangers in their orchard, “[e]nchanted into stillness by surprise.”

Return to Prydain with Jared Crossley’s 69-minute documentary about Lloyd Alexander, now out on DVD. (Disclosure: I did a small amount of unpaid work on this project.)

Looking for a lurid novel in the heavy-metal club scene? Warren Moore’s headbanger noir Broken Glass Waltzes is now out for the Kindle.

Erik Kwakkel looks for the oldest photo of a person with a medieval manuscript—and finds a heck of a shot from Ohio instead.

Speaking of minuscule, the Classical Bookworm finds wonderful tiny libraries (including one built from Lego).

Lingwë delves: Did Tolkien coin the plural “dwarves”?

Nancy Marie Brown turns back to half-forgotten fantasist E.R. Eddison.

So Many Books digs The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science.

Sarah Werner suggests that in the humanities job market, you make your own luck.

Writer and professor Ann Boesky recalls her life as a Sweet Valley High ghostwriter.

Wuthering Expectations cracks open “the most boring and mendacious author in the whole of German literature.”

Jake Seliger reads the urban-planning book Planet of Cities.

Steve Donoghue explores Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.

Cynthia Haven fondly remembers Edna St. Vincent Millay.

First Known When Lost honors four-line poems.