Louisiana State University Press,  2003

Some poems from Claire may be found here under the heading, “Contemporary Poets.”

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Comments from poets:

Readers of Marly Youmans know her supple, sensuous prose.  In Claire she shifts to the more nervous rhythms of poetry, exploring the dark, rich realms of childhood.  Claire’s universe is alive with activity, birds, beasts, and flowers, to use the Laurentian title.  But really it is Tennyson she reminds me of, the melody, the melancholy of ‘Lady in a Tower, 1870.’

--John Montague

 Youmans began her writing career as a poet, so I am glad to see her returning to her first love after years of writing fiction.  Claire, her first book of poems, shows her facility with language and formal structure, as well as her gift for weaving the personal and the mythic into an elegantly textured narrative.

--Kathryn Stripling Byer

 Rereading these fine poems has given me a sense of returning home to a place of good things:  wisdom, courage, goodness, and beauty preserved against so many brutal assaults.  It may be in the country, in the past, in dreams, or in art, but Claire finds always what another poet called ‘a place for the genuine.’  The reader is given convincing details—names, places, and flowers—with the stamp of authenticity in the sure handling of language and music.  Time and again, I hear what seems to be perfect wording and pacing.  Youmans’s poems address a world accurately registered and carefully kept—in gracious reminders of old meanings of ‘keep’:  care, attention, heed, notice.  I wish more poems were like these.

--William Harmon