Tales of the François Vase
A Poem and Radio Play by Julia Older
Julia Older’s obsession with the famous Francois Vase led to both the radio play and the book-length poem. The dramatic 25-century journey of the vase winds through a subterranean inferno of greed, passion, and terror. Twice it was smashed into 600-plus pieces, came unglued, and was puzzled together, each time with a piece missing. A third time — during the 1966 Florence Flood — a scientist intentionally broke the vase. He restored it with the missing piece, and at last it was whole. Older’s book offers readers the entire fascinating story. The poem is illustrated with the vase figures from the Iliad and the book includes a “backstory” with Older’s original translations of her research.
THE VASE SPEAKS! | CLICK HERE TO LISTEN
“Before printed books there were talking vases. Julia Older found one Greek vase that talked and is still talking, in defiance of weather, war, and malevolence. Julia Older renders the voices that attended the François Vase from its birth in the potter’s hands to what its admirers and enemies said when they held, lost, hunted, or broke it. All these voices speak in rhythms the poet fancied or channeled, and they tell a picaresque and musical drama of that Western mind that flows from ancient Greece to X-rays. Once a talking vase, it’s now Julia’s singing vase. You can sing along.”
—Andrei Codrescu, Writer and NPR CommentatorThe CD included with this book is a 33-minute radio drama introduced by a 10-minute director-author interview. The production was chosen by Radio Works’ Best Independent Programs for syndication and broadcast to more than sixty public radio stations coast to coast.
Tales of the François Vase is Volume III of the Hobblebush Granite State Poetry Series. Other volumes:
From the Box Marked Some Are Missing by Charles W. Pratt
Earth Listening by Becky Sakellariou
About the Author
JULIA OLDER has written poetry, essays, fiction, nonfiction and plays. Four of her eleven poetry books are booklength poems, including the mythical journey of Hermaphroditus in America and Tahirih Unveiled, based on the life of Persia’s first women’s rights activist.
Literary honors include a First Hopwood Poetry Award from the University of Michigan, Mary Roberts Rinehart Grant for Prose, North Carolina First Poetry Book Grant, Independent Publisher Bronze Poetry Medal, First Daniel Varoujian Poetry Award, several Pushcart Nominations, and fellowships to the Iowa Poetry Workshop, Yaddo, and The MacDowell Colony.
Two historical novels from Older’s Isles of Shoals Trilogy were featured in Reading Group Choices national guidebook: The Island Queen, about celebrated Shoals writer Celia Thaxter, and This Desired Place, a 17th century New World saga which won the Independent Publisher Gold Medal for Best Northeast Regional Fiction (New England and New York).
Julia’s memoir, Appalachian Odyssey, recounts her adventure as the 19th woman to walk the 2000-mile Appalachian Trail and also contains many poems written en route. The Authors Guild selected the memoir for its Back-in-Print Series, and it received the National Outdoor Book Awards Classic Honorable Mention as "a lasting book that has proven to be a significant work in the field."
Other work by Older appears in Poets & Writers, The New Yorker, Entelechy International, New Directions, Amazon Shorts, Sisters of the Earth: Women Writing about Nature, and numerous other journals and anthologies. She writes from her studio in the foothills of Grand Monadnock, New Hampshire.
88 pp, Paperback
ISBN 978-0-9845921-2-8
Publication Date: Spring, 2012
Price: $20
THE HOBBLEBUSH
GRANITE STATE
POETRY SERIES:
VOLUME III
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