Donald Sidney-Fryer’s “The Atlantis Fragments” unites lyrics inscribed to poets of bygone times (Edmund Spenser, Ambrose Bierce, Nora May French, Clark Ashton Smith) with paeans in praise of the iffinix, hippokampos and unicorn. Whether letting the pen glide easily through an insular-oceanic pastoral of young lovers on the run, or unfolding a story-poem of an older couple whose vacation in Averonne masks a deeper quest, Sidney-Fryer has shaped a career as troubadour of the lost island of Atlantis and other mythic realms.
He has also fashioned a verse instrument tuned to the chords and keys of the Elizabethans, or of Renaissance Pléiade poets like Ronsard. Yet Mr. Sidney-Fryer can adapt his verse to deft critiques of our modern throwaway culture, or to laments (turned with a light hand) for what we have let slip. Ostensibly, he subscribes to Clark Ashton Smith’s doctrine of the anti-utilitarian: as Smith puts it, “The proponents of the utile and the informative should stick to prose—which, to be frank, is all that they achieve, as a rule.”
Yet Sidney-Fryer’s allegiance to the great epic of Spenser, surely a most useful allegory in its day, suggests an undercurrent of purpose, a feeling that magic is to be put into real effect in our daily lives. The thought might be expressed thus:
On Donald Sidney-Fryer’s “The Atlantis Fragments”
How magical, your volume of Atlantis!
Yet just beneath the magic, elegy
for antique spells discarded like the mantis
male lopped headless once the progeny
first burgeon. Yes, perhaps now we deem useless
whole cultures founded on old poetry,
think witches with their simples fools too juiceless
to duck or burn or hang: irrelevancies.
Yet Spenser lives! His Anglo-Irish vision
inspires and spices your allegory—is not
Atlantis the fabled California island
downshook, though not by seismic sudden fission
or passion of Poseidon? Sheer gold lie-land
dragged under by her incessant schemes and plots…
