The Winds of Ilion

When Novalis declared that "the world must be romanticized," that it must be restored to its plenary "meaning, magic, and mystery," he, like Friedrich Schlegel touts the fragment as the vehicle of this restorative art. The Winds of Ilion is an eclectic work that brings together poetry, academic essay, personal memoir, short-short story, and creative fragments in a manner redolent both of the early German romantics and of the Greek concept of moira. The many different creative threads composing this work weave a fabric of variegated meanings whose scope extends to the disparate events and marginal circumstances both of literary and everyday life. --- "Steven Joyce's book offers a fascinating combination of various literary forms. Readers will find it both enjoyable and instructive. The author maintains that we can recapture, through reading, the uplifting romantic spirit of an earlier age. I am happy to report that this volume does indeed rekindle that spirit. It did for me." (Susanna Piontek, member of the PEN Club and of Die Kogge, European Writers' Association)