Publisher's Synopsis
Evil never dies, and neither do the poets who dwell in the shadowland of Gothic gloom and supernatural horror. This treasury of supernatural-themed poems is a supplement to Brett Rutherford's anthology series, Tales of Terror. Inspired by Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon chronicles, the medieval tale of a bad bishop eaten by rats, the lore of the shape-shifter incubus known as Puck, the German ghost-ballad of "Lenore," and the vision of a frenzied witches' sabbath, Gothic poets have mined mythology and history to clothe ancient terrors in new language. The 96 poems selected for this anthology come from the United States, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Peru, and Colombia. Treasures to be found in this volume include the tale of Siegfried and the dragon, a succubus in a World War I battlefield, The Grim Reaper's Dance of Death, alluring and fatal cemetery specters, and an avenging revenant - plus ghosts, witches, vampires, were-ravens and dreads that cannot be named. Among the 41 writers featured are Goethe, Rossetti, Hugo, Gautier, Cawein, Holland, Longfellow, Kipling, Southey, Marquis, Browning, Rutherford, Todhunter, Vanderbeck, and Wagner.
Highlights include the translation of Bürger's "Lenore" made by Dante Gabriel Rossetti at age 16; new translations of classic French poems of terror by Gautier and Hugo; poems based on the "Dance of Death" engravings of Hans Holbein; a selection of supernatural poems by Madison Cawein, "the American Keats;" newly rediscovered poems by American Gothic great Barbara A. Holland; selections another nearly-forgotten poet, Fannie Stearns Davis; and new translations of landmark dark poems from 19th-century Spain and Latin America. For the poetry lover, and for the fan of supernatural literature, this book is a year-round Halloween treat of entertaining and alarming poems to read aloud - bedtime stories for very bad children. For the scholar of the Gothic, it supplements the huge collection already assembled in the four preceding volumes of Tales of Wonder and Tales of Terror. The book also includes a cumulative index and bibliography for the entire series.
