Books
Gothic Keats Press is proud to announce our first publication, A Ride Through Faerie & Other Poems by Clay Franklin Johnson, with illustrations by Eli John. Clay’s collection is in honour of our beloved poet John Keats on the bicentennial year of his tragic death in 1821. The book was released on 10 December 2021 in both hardcover and electronic formats. The first edition hardcover is available to purchase from our website’s Bookshop. You can find both the paperback edition and Kindle on Amazon, as well as Barnes & Noble, and from select bookshops throughout the world, including The Whitby Bookshop, Golden Hare Books in Edinburgh, Treadwell’s Books in London, Blackwell’s Bookshop in both Oxford and Manchester, and Faulkner House Books in New Orleans.
First edition hardcover, 5.75” x 8.5”, 200 pages (including front matter), 6 highly detailed illustrations printed on 100# gloss paper. FREE SHIPPING on all US orders; flat fee of $10 on all international orders.
Purchase the Kindle on Amazon here:
Below is just a taste of what you will find inside…
The poem was inspired by Edinburgh’s Samhuinn Fire Festival that took place atop Calton Hill on 31 October 2018, which is both Halloween and Keats’s birthday. The illustration depicts the view from the hill with Edinburgh’s Gothic skyline in the background, while the focal point represents the metamorphosis of the goddess Brìghde (associated with spring) into the blue-skinned Cailleach (from Old Irish Caillech, “veiled one”), also known in Scotland as Beira, Queen of Winter.
She then revealed herself to me:
The Veiled One, between Life & Death,
Yet She is immortal, deathless,
Rider of storms, the wolf-charmer,
Goddess of frosts & lengthening darkness
She peeled off Her silver-spun flesh
Of cloud-lightning, spellbound by light
Alive with eyes of liminal skies,
And, intoxicated by eternity,
I beheld two worlds of one dark reality
—from “The Fires of Ecstasy at Samhuinn” (read the full poem here)
My sleep-dissolved eyes awakened
Amidst gilt-bronze curiosities,
Objet de vertu, Louis XV
Rocaille & antique Florentine,
Haughty portraiture from the House
Of The Young Chevalier, Bonnie Charlie,
Fire-singed fragments of Alfieri
And unfinished oil-originals
Of the fair-eyed & unrevenged
Daughter of the incestuous-sick Cenci
But in this room of rich opulence
Hid the design of her sick secrets:
Skin-stitched rotting dolls, oddly posed,
Decaying mannequins with dead faces…
—from “Edinburgh Ecstasies”
(read the full poem here)
The poem was partly written at The Jolly Botanist in Edinburgh (note the long-stemmed teacups in the bottom left), and partly inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s verse drama The Cenci (1820), based on the tragic story of Beatrice Cenci. According to Mary Shelley, Percy was inspired to write the drama after viewing the supposed portrait of Beatrice in Rome. That very portrait is included in the illustration above.
This is the second illustration of three from “Lines Written by Moonlight at Whitby Abbey”. To see the third illustration read the full poem here.
Then, from a passing shadow of night-mist,
Glistening wet like vitreous black opal,
Fleeting by upon a floating ghost-cloud
Carrying each color of pestilence,
There came a change: within the imprisoned
Beam of moonlight, and around those ghastly,
Still-watching eyes, there appeared a strange face,
Yet familiar as it took shape in the mists,
As if gazing into polished moon-glass
And finding the gaze of my own self-eclipse
—from “Lines Written by Moonlight at Whitby Abbey”
(read the full poem here)
And though vividly delicious
On Victorian-papered walls
—Patterns of bats –spectral-green–, skeleton-
Fingered wings, gossamer-wisped veins, sinewed
Demon flesh, diffused and twisted through miles
Of pale-purpling opium flowers—
It too can be used for painted smiles
And smoke-inspired eyeshadow dyes
—from “My Little Green Secret”
(read the full poem here)
The illustration illustrates quite perfectly the poem’s inspiration: arsenic-laced Emerald Green Victorian wallpaper. The arsenical pigments were also known as Paris Green and Scheele’s Green, and were used in paintings, ball gowns, artificial foliage, and even in candies. The antagonist of the poem, a Gothic Barry Lyndon of sorts, secretly administers this slow-killing poison in the guise of sore-concealing cosmetics.
Praise for Clay and Eli
“Self-consciously locating himself in a poetic tradition that goes at least as far back as Shakespeare, Clay Franklin Johnson has composed a deeply affecting Liebestod to the powers of the Gothic imagination. … This is a Coleridgean witchery of sound as refracted through a glass of absinthe. Subtle literary allusions momentarily appear and fade away like ghosts, while the familiar strictures of form, rhyme and metre are often invoked if only to be reinvented and laid creatively to rest. … here, darkness tussles tirelessly with desire, as poison with passion, extinction with ecstasy. I know of no other contemporary poet who is capable of combining so intimate, even autobiographical a register with such an informed deployment of the Gothic mode.”
Dale Townshend
Professor of Gothic Literature, Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies
“Inspired by Romanticism, A Ride Through Faerie & Other Poems by Clay F. Johnson, is a vibrant collection of narrative poetry full of vivid imagery. The poems, replete with intense emotion and lush writing, should particularly appeal to fans of the Gothic Fantasy genre.”
Karen Lee Street
Author of The Poe & Dupin Mystery trilogy
“Eli John’s artwork is a nocturnal wonder to behold. Timeless & evocative, he paints all the colours of the night world with a depth and beauty that is sometimes lost in the supernatural sphere. He dips his pen in a whorl of darkness that can never date as it is already steeped in ancient ruins and glittering decay.”
Nina Antonia
Author of Dancing with Salome, Incurable, and The Greenwood Faun
“Clay’s hallucinatory verses are perfectly matched with Eli John’s palimpsestic illustrations. In these pages, ghosts from the past populate sublime landscapes and sweep the reader off into a maelstrom of richly sensorial visions influenced by Gothic Romantic poetry.”
Maria J Pérez Cuervo
Writer, editor, and founder of Hellebore magazine
“Clay Franklin Johnson's lyrical poetry blends Gothic romanticism with elements of fantasy, folklore, and horror into a dark and delicious landscape for readers to discover and wander in.”
Amanda Bergloff
Contributing Editor of Enchanted Conversation, and founder of #FairyTaleTuesday on Twitter
“Clay Franklin Johnson’s poetry is dark, lush, and hypnotic; a labyrinthine midnight garden of nightshade and opium. Here you will find serpent-haired maids dancing through the fires of Samhuinn, phantasmagorical nocturnes of “blue ghosts […] and green-eyed cicadae”, arachnid fae queens, witches who can grow storms and bury “stars in shards of black opal,” and even the “sulfur-eyed” Morning Star himself. These poems are drunk on the sensuousness of existence, on the magic of breath and stars and dance. Drink deeply.”
Rebecca Buchanan
Founder of Eternal Haunted Summer, and winner of the Rhysling Award
“I was enchanted by Johnson’s Eco-Gothic poem ‘A Ride Through Faerie’, inspired by the Amazon fires of 2019, which opens his collection, and I presented a paper about it at ‘Ill Met by Moonlight’, a conference organised by the University of Hertfordshire in April 2021. I spoke about John Keats’s influence on the poem, Johnson’s favourite poet whom he often writes about, such as essays that touch on Keats’s 1819 love letters to his beloved Fanny Brawne. Johnson’s powerful imagery creates astonishingly visual poetry, and his depictions of hallucinations, traditional in Gothic fiction, are vivid and wonderfully original. Moreover, his fantastical poetic landscapes intertwine wistfulness and enthusiasm…
A Ride Through Faerie & Other Poems combines inspiration from some of the best Romantic and Gothic authors into both biographical and illusory poetry from one of the most personal contemporary authors. Johnson’s world is unique, his personal experiences brilliantly elucidate characteristics and ideas from writers such as Keats, Mary and Percy Shelley, Coleridge, Byron, and even Stoker, especially observable in ‘Lines Written by Moonlight at Whitby Abbey’. Even the madness often read in Edgar Allan Poe is perceived in Johnson’s best lines. Johnson is one of a kind, a free nineteenth-century poetic spirit alive in today’s twenty-first century world.”
Tatiana Fajardo
PhD student at Universidad del País Vasco