Sidney-Fryer, Donald.  Songs and Sonnets Atlantean: The Second Series. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2003.

Gullette, Alan.   Acts of Love. Ill. Norm Rosenberger.  Oakland, CA: Elephant Printing, 2003.

by S. T. Joshi

The California poetic renaissance has been in full flower for more than a century. Ambrose Bierce--although he claimed to be more of a wit than a poet--did more than write some of the most scintillating satiric poetry in all literary history, embalmed in such volumes as Black Beetles in Amber (1892) and Shapes of Clay (1903). He was also a colleague and advocate of such local poets as Emma Frances Dawson and Ina Coolbrith, and more significantly, he nurtured the poetic fires of such writers as George Sterling and, albeit indirectly, Clark Ashton Smith. If there were any justice in the world, Sterling would be hailed as perhaps the most proficient sonneteer in American literature and Smith as one of the great poets--not merely a great fantastic poet--of his time. But both poets encountered the Modernist movement of the 1920sa movement that, spearheaded by such diverse figures as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Amy Lowell, and Harriet Monroe, did more in my judgment to destroy poetry as a vital and integral facet of American culture than the Gothic barbarians did to destroy Roman civilization. The result is that poetry, having become by turns entirely obscure or entirely prosaic, now plays--for the first time in Western history--no role in the intellectual lives of even literate readers.

But California, to this day, holds out against the dominant tendencies of the age. Whether we appeal to such older poets as Robinson Jeffers or to such moderns as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the Californians have not forgotten that poetry is a matter of image, symbol, metaphor, and rhythm, not of plain, prosy statement. Clark Ashton Smith was an active poet from the 1910s until his death in 1961, and his collected poems--now in the process of compilation--may finally reveal his immense stature as an imaginative craftsman.

Donald Sidney-Fryer embodies, in his long and distinguished career, a line of continuity between the Californians of the early twentieth century and those of the present day. A friend and colleague of Smith who, even before Smith's death, was at work on a bibliography of that writer's work (culminating in Emperor of Dreams: A Clark Ashton Smith Bibliography, 1980), Sidney-Fryer burst into celebrity with Songs and Sonnets Atlantean (1971), one of the last volumes published by Arkham House under its founder August Derleth's direct supervision. This remarkable collection of poems and prose-poems displayed Sidney-Fryer as an assured master of many poetic forms--the quatrain, the sonnet, the ode, and especially the alexandrine, which has become his signature metre--aslwell as a fantastic imagination that, to be sure, draws upon the work of Smith, Bierce, and the Elizabethans, but remains distinctively his own.

Sidney-Fryer has now, at long last, issued a second volume of songs and sonnets, and it is a welcome addition to the still slim array of meritorious fantasy verse (The back cover blurb seriously errs in stating that the book is merely a "new and expanded edition" of Songs and Sonnets Atlantean; in fact, there is no duplication of contents, and this new volume contains works that have never been gathered in book form).  It displays all the virtues we have come to expect from Sidney-Fryer: felicitous word-choice, precision in metre, and especially a vibrant, exotic imagination that vivifies realms of fantasy into living realities.

There is, indeed, a touch of melancholy to the volume--a melancholy resulting from its frequent dedication of individual poems to notable weird authors who have passed on. Fritz Leiber, H. Warner Munn, Stanley McNail (a far too little-known weird poet), and others are recipients of eloquent poems and elegies; the one on Leiber concludes as follows:

Neither Sterling nor Smith could have done better than this.

The crown jewel of Songs and Sonnets Atlantean: Second Series is A Vision of a Castle Deep in Averonne, a sixty-page narrative poem with all the richness of incident, depth of character portrayal, and fantastic imagination of a novel, yet written in smoothly flowing alexandrines that leave the reader hoping that the poem will never end. To be sure, there is a somewhat more prosaic quality to this work, a product both of its setting in the present day (If he were free, then they would go to that old realm / She would arrange it all with her own travel agent) and of the need to carry the narrative forward briskly. But Sidney-Fryer deftly lures the reader both from the present to the past and from the real to the imaginary, in this cumulatively potent account of an elderly couple who seek to probe their ancestral ties to a family that occupied a castle in Clark Ashton Smith's mythical French realm of Averoigne. Sidney-Fryer has successfully recited this poem at many poetry readings in California, and it is gratifying to see it in print. The volume concludes with a hefty section of notes on the poems' notes that, in the substantial background they provide, are in many cases nearly as fascinating as the poems themselves.

Alan Gullette's Acts of Love is not to be compared with Sidney-Fryer's volume, for it is a small chapbook chiefly meant to accompany some elegant line-drawings of two models, posing in various positions simulating sexual union, by Norm Rosenberger. And yet, Gullette, a young poet who, as a teenager, achieved celebrity with two superlative issues of the fanzine Ambrosia (1972-73), is himself worthy to carry the torch of Californian imaginative poetry. Consider, for example, the delicate lyric "Trees" from Gullette's earlier volume, Another Eucharist (Elephant Printing, 1995):

This seemingly slight poem perfectly fulfils the true function of poetry--the exquisite etching of the symbolic ramifications of a single, simple image. Much other good work by Gullette can be found in From a Safe Distance (Anamnesis Press, 2000). A forthcoming volume of poetry, Reviving a Dead Priest, has been announced. Gullette, who runs one of the most notable websites devoted to supernatural literature (www.creative.net/~alang/lit/horror/horror.sht), has also written an SF/fantasy novella, The Green Transfer (Corelli Press, 1995). His writing is far too little-known, and one can only hope that a publisher like Wildside or Hippocampus Press sees the wisdom of gathering it into an accessible volume. In the meantime, copies may be obtained from the author himself (alang@creative.net).