Performing "Four Fables" by Clark Ashton Smith. 4 to 6pm.
Sunday, November 12th. The Book Collector, 1008 24th Street
Sacramento. Free.
Donald Sidney-Fryer is the last in this great line of poets and
writers that reaches from Ambrose Bierce to George Sterling and
Nora May French, from Sterling to his protigi Clark Ashton Smith,
and from Smith to his pupil Sidney-Fryer.
Specialist of mediaeval romance and epic poem, Donald Sidney-Fryer
has interested himself in this poetic genre not only as people
practised it in the 12th and 13th centuries but also as they have
continued to practise it over the course of the centuries following,
and as such modern poets as the California Romantics have understood
how to renew it at the beginning of the 20th century.
Donald Sidney-Fryer has edited Clark Ashton Smith's Selected
Poems as well as Smith's story collections Other Dimensions,
The City of the Singing Flame, The Monster of the Prophecy and
The Last Incantation. Sidney-Fryer also assembled the mordant
horror and fantasy poetry of Ambrose Bierce under the title
"A Vision of Doom." His own first collection of verse, "Songs
and Sonnets Atlantean," was the final book to appear from
Arkham House (originally dedicated to publishing the works of
Howard Phillips Lovecraft) under the personal supervision of
that press's founder, August Derleth, one of the many people in
the related arena of horror literature that Sidney-Fryer has
known over the years.
