Thaliad

A while ago I was looking at a poet's website and saw that her next book was a post-apocalyptic blank verse epic, with specially commissioned illustrations. Someone's written a book just for me! I thought to myself. And Marly Youmans has, it would seem, done just that: Thaliad is a marvellous work, an exciting and heartbreaking myth of origin for a society born of a clutch of children who survive a nuclear war. (Youmans' very name suggests a post-English-language attempt to write the name of our species.)

For this and all other images here, click for a much bigger version, showing all the textures and brushstrokes

The book, published by Phoenicia Publishing of Canada , is a really lovely work. The cover and the many internal illustrations are by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

Clive's process for the internal illustrations is interesting: he makes a sketch of the proposed illustration, and then prepares a number of sheets of thin paper, decorated with various weights and textures of black brushstrokes. From these sheets he cuts various shapes, which are arranged into a collage to form the illustration. Some elements are stencilled in using shapes cut freehand into blank paper. See here for more details of his workings.

Here they are in situ, working with Youmans' text:

Hicks-Jenkins has also created the covers for three of Youmans's other books:

Thaliad comes out at the start of December.