Released at NecronomiCon Providence 2017, where Donald Sidney-Fryer is Poet Laureate & Guest of Honor.
For more than fifty years, Donald Sidney-Fryer has been exhibiting his profound and wide-ranging sensitivity to all forms of art—music, painting, sculpture, ballet, and most of all, poetry. In this new collection of previously uncollected and unpublished essays, Sidney-Fryer displays the wealth of knowledge and the keen critical judgment he has developed in a lifetime of immersion in the fine arts.
The book opens with a fascinating diary-essay recounting a trip Sidney-Fryer took to El Salvador in 2016, in the company of master painter Jesse Allen, whose murals are described vividly and evocatively. Sidney-Fryer subsequently treats a wealth of other subjects, ranging from the poetic methodology of his own classic work, Songs and Sonnets Atlantean (1971), the prose and poetry of H. P. Lovecraft, the films of the 1930s and 1940s, and much else besides.
The second half of Aesthetics, Ho! is titled “Ends and Odds: A Poetic Miscellany,” an assemblage of nearly 60 poems and prose-poems that Sidney-Fryer has written in recent years. Here we find tributes to the work of Lovecraft, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, and the imagination-stirring travel accounts of Marco Polo, an evocation of the King Arthur legend, and an amusing parody of Clark Ashton Smith (“The Nonsense Eater: By Quark Ashcan Smiff”), the author whom Sidney-Fryer has spent a lifetime in studying.
All told, this volume demonstrates Donald Sidney-Fryer’s continuing dynamism as an artist and critic in his eighth decade of life.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
(Essays)
Introduction
Jesse Allen’s First Mural A Defense and Illustration of One Poetic Method San Francisco, by G. Sutton Breiding A Note on History and/or Historiography Old versus New Poetry and Poetry Again Perfect Form, Perfect Shape Atlantis One Poetic Practice H. P. Lovecraft—A Belated Homage Flickering Shadows on a Lighted Screen Intangibility That’s Hollywood? That’s Hollywood! Farewell to All That Appendix: Ends and Odds: A Poetic Miscellany
St. Ichabod The Conquistadors A Modest Breviary A Labyrinth of Caverns Swimming Somewhere in the Antillias A Modest Beastiary A Colonnade out of Time Temporal Enigma On the Death Mask of J. Sheridan Le Fanu The Crippled Octopus To a Professor of Professors Puzzlement Isca Silurum The Capricorn The Key Brave Ocean Cavaliers Queen Elizabeth II: 2016 What’s in a Name? Indeed, Just What Lies in a Name? Where Now the Towns of Legend and of Myth? And Have You Seen a Peacock as of Late? Retrospective Have You Viewed the Big Five? Are They All still Extant? Enigma The Bird of Indigo and Verde The Transcendence of King Bhumibol “Yea, Though I Walk through the Valley of the Numen of Light. . .” Another Forsaken Garden The Forsaken Garden Again Some Holy Grail Another Grail Re-found An Obvious Announcement Artorius, Arthurius, or Arthur Rex? The Lyre-Bird Upon a Maya Pyramid in El Salvador The Nonsense Eater A King out of Macedonia Alexandros Megalos Fountains Katnyptian A Song in Reverse A Sunday Noontide Ritual Mouse in Boots The “X”—The Unknown Quantity By the Light of Flambeaux The Grove of Ceiba Trees along the Stream Those Giant Ceiba Trees Again From Script to Script, From Crypt to Crypt On Jesse Allen’s Biggest African Tableau “The Girl with the Ice Cream Tits” The New Conquistadors Lo Ordinario A Maya Pyramid Revisited The Cup from Otherwhere Divertissement I Divertissement II Transition To H. P. L.—A Tribute out of Time A Bit of Nostalgia The Hunting of the Ampersand Notes
This product was added to our catalog on Saturday 03 June, 2017.
