The Green Carnation

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Green Carnation" by Robert Hichens. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Green Carnations, Glas na Gile, compiled and published in 2020, is an anthology of verse from twenty-five contributing LGBT+ poets on the island of Ireland.The book charts the ups and downs of first loves, longer partnered relationships and sexual encounters.If "the heart is a lonely hunter", the poets featured know the terrain.Theirs is a country where the motley of individuality is struggled with and worn. No tiresome sameness in the verse, but, at their best brave lines and voices heard and felt at the raw nerve of human existence, what it means to be human in an LGBT+ context. One that is as old as and older still than the creatorly plains of genesis.The poets are gathered by their first names, or initials, and range in age from the late teens, -some in their final Leaving Certificate Year 2020 - to the thirties. The same-sex Irish Marriage 2015 Referendum passed by a majority of the electorate (celebrated in some poems) is a line in the sand to be lived with, accepted and celebrated.Each poet was requested to contribute a short biography and to introduce the poems. Some poets prefer to use a pseudonym. Some accompany their poems with artwork. All struggle with identity, who they are. Individuality rather than editorial sameness is reflected where possible.Sometimes something of a sharedness of serenity is achieved. More often than not the growing pains, loves, endearments and durabilities that are anyone's in a relationship.The book is essentially a young person's anthology, a sharing among contributors and with readers as all face a common future.

The charming aesthete Esmé Amarinthe and his beautiful young acolyte Reggie Hastings live for art and artifice and reject all that is natural and "middle-class". When in the society of their peers, Esmé and Reggie elucidate and pontificate through endless epigrams and ironies that shock and entertain.But when a very real proposition of marriage to a wealthy widow enters the equation, Reggie wonders if he should go through with it, or continue his life of passionate paradox with Mr. Amarinthe.Robert Hichen's satire of Oscar Wilde is a romp that skewers the aesthetic ideals of the era while at the same time delighting in them.

From wedding bouquets to funeral wreaths, carnations can be seen everywhere in human culture. Their colorful but delicately folded petals have made them one of the foremost decorative flowers, from the gardens of the Ottoman Empire to American Mothers Day bouquets, via Chinese medicines and French Empresses. In this book, Twigs Way explores the extraordinary history of this inimitable flower. The author traces the trials and tribulations of early breeders—compelled by florists’ fascinations for the striped and spotted—which led to delightfully colored (and delightfully named) varieties such as Lustie Gallant and Bleeding Swain. She looks at the symbolism of the red and white—and even green—carnations made famous by Oscar Wilde, and glides through many of the rooms in literature and history that we have filled with the carnation’s glorious scent. Travelling from Europe to China, Way explores how carnations have been used by herbalists the world over as a treatment for ailments to both mind and body, and she looks at the many paintings that have attempted to capture their unique complexities. Lavishly illustrated and full of unexpected delights, this book will—like the carnation itself—charm the mind and invigorate the senses.