New Wandrei Collection

[j d worthington]

Seems Hippocampus Press has a new collection of Donald Wandrei's verse and prose poetry coming out, with illustrations by his brother Howard. Much of this has been collected before, but those editions are quite scarce and costly (such as Arkham House's Poems for Midnight); but there are things here that have never been collected before, as well. The title is Sanctity and Sin: The Collected Poetry and Prose-Poems of Donald Wandrei. It is edited by S. T. Joshi, and due out ca. April this year.

Sanctity and Sin: The Collected Poetry and Prose-Poems of Donald Wandrei - Hippocampus Press

I post it here because of the connection to Lovecraft and Smith, but also because a great deal of Wandrei's work was inspired by his extremely detailed and vivid nightmares; something which is evident when reading either his weird fiction or much of his poetry, which has the air of nightmarish dream. For those who enjoy vivid, colorful, imaginative imagery and phantasmagoria, this should definitely be a volume worth looking into.

Incidentally, for those who don't know, Wandrei's Sonnets for the Midnight Hours was one of the major inspirations and influences on Lovecraft's own sonnet sequence, Fungi from Yuggoth. And, just to give an idea of the sort of subjects we're talking about here, you might want to look at this entry on Poems for Midnight, the complete contents of which will be available in this volume as well:

Poems for Midnight - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[ghyle]

Also to be noted in relation to this collection is the concordance compiled by myself. It is the first in a series of concordances that I plan on doing: I am partway through the Lovecraft one, and I have plans to do ones for Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard as well.

Hopefully, the two (the collection and the concordance) will encourage more writing about the poetry.

 

[j d worthington]

Good to see someone doing some work on the poetry. It's a pity that our age seems to gift such short shrift to poetry -- perhaps a reaction to the Modernist movement? At any rate: some of these writers, through their poetry, found ways to concentrate the awe and sense of wonder (as well as terror) in very memorable ways, and I highly recommend them.

Bob Howard's poetry, while very traditional in form, nonetheless has a lot to recommend it, and some of the intensity of emotion he brought to his stories definitely shines through in his best poetry. Smith was often a brilliant poet, period. Lovecraft's poetry is at least almost always rich in thought and allusion -- even his political poetry has a lot of very terse history lessons packed in small compass -- and at times also brilliant. So I am very pleased to hear about the concordance on each, and hope you'll provide more information on them... and wish you the best of luck with them!

 

[ghyle]

Basically they'll list the words used, and give the context in which they're found. Part of the problem has been locating the texts of the poetry, organising the poems, and then the slog of compiling the concordances and editing the raw concordance into the final form.

It takes time, which I lack, given that I'm also studying at university at the moment.

 

[j d worthington]

Oh, that does indeed take up a lot of a person's time. Good luck, and thanks for all the hard work!

 

[ghyle]

It's too much of a pleasure to be hard work...

 

[j d worthington]

It's too much of a pleasure to be hard work...

LOL! I believe I know what you mean....