A Ride Through Faerie & Other Poems

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A Ride Through Faerie & Other Poems is Clay Franklin Johnson’s debut collection of poetry in honor of John Keats on the bicentennial year of his tragic death in 1821. Clay’s poems, influenced by the darker side of Romanticism, capture atmospheres of nightmarish dreamscapes, often easing broodingly into “night-worlds” of otherworldly beauty, painting phantasmal scenes of visionary imagery, vivid with wondrous landscapes of the supernatural sublime, alive with “night-creatures” that exist in duality between dark and light, between death and life, and between this world and what waits on the other side.

Clay’s poetry is obsessive, haunted by phantasms, ghosts of guilt, regret, longing, memories of lost loved ones, and possesses a particular penchant for that brooding, melancholy aesthetic of Gothic literature. The collection is passionately inspired by Clay’s travels, containing poems of night-wanderings among the Gothic ruins of Whitby Abbey, a piece of macabre decadence written during his cold autumn and winter living in Edinburgh, and even a spiritual retelling of the faery Mélusine inspired by a Shelleyan sort of illusion upon the enchanted waters of Asturian seas, whispering with illusory voices and hallucinatory madness.

Clay has collaborated with the artist Eli John who has produced evocative illustrations for leading genre publishers in both the US and UK. Eli’s stunning artwork in this collection, created by densely layering elements of photography, traditional drawing, painting, and collage, has brought brilliant visual illustration to Clay’s poetry, capturing haunting atmospheres and night-worlds in poems such as “Lines Written by Moonlight at Whitby Abbey”, “The Fires of Ecstasy at Samhuinn”, “My Little Green Secret”, and “Edinburgh Ecstasies”.