Aesthetics Ho! Essays on Art, Literature, and Theatre

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 In this new collection of previously uncollected and unpublished essays, Sidney-Fryer displays the wealth of knowledge and the keen critical judgment he has developed in a lifetime of immersion in the fine arts.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, Arthur Machen, and 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.