Heir to the Rowan Hills’ throne, Prince Asmo has heard the saying all his life. Yet on a drunken dare he cuts down a sacred Rowan, a tree whose magic soon murders his best friend and curses Asmo’s life.   In terror he flees, far to the north, where a girl--the winsome daughter of a fallen wizard—serves him hallucinogenic tea.   Angrily, he leaves her, but she begins to haunt his dreams.

      Neither one knows, but their destiny is one, a destiny that will loose demons upon the world, bring down centuries of belief, and in the end, change history forever.

        The Rowan Canticles is first and foremost an adventure story, a novel in verse. Each of its 12,555  lines employs eight syllables, often in iambs, occasionally not. Like a symphony, it has been written in three movements, Canticles I, II, and III. 

        Hidden in its symphonic rhyme scheme are numerical and prosodic games left for the reader to find and play. Canticle I is rhymed in heroic couplets, Canticle II in quatrains.  The third movement, Canticle III, at first features eight-line mirror whorls, then free verse as the mirror whorls echo and fade, and finally an extended modulation from free verse back to heroic couplets.

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        The free verse cantos in Canticle III’s recapitulation feature “distant rhymes”.  In other words, a line ending with “sand” may sit next to a line ending with “bonds” in the text, but somewhere in the canto, if one searches, a line ending in “strand” or “grand” will indeed appear, completing that distant rhyme.  This applies to all free verse cantos.

        As for numerological mysteries, suffice it to say that The Rowan Canticles resembles a crystal composed of lattices of magical 3’s.

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