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Poet and performing artist Donald Sidney-Fryer is the last in the great line of California Romantics that reaches from Ambrose Bierce to George Sterling and Nora May French, from Sterling to his protege Clark Ashton Smith, and from Smith to his pupil Sidney-Fryer. Carrying on the tradition of "pure poetry" of Keats and Shelley long after it was abandoned by the mainstream poetry establishment, the California Romantics created two monuments in verse in Sterling's epic "A Wine of Wizardry" and Smith's even more astonishing "The Hashish-Eater."
In a long career Sidney-Fryer has given dramatic readings from these poets around America and Europe. He 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 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. |
