The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems of Clark Ashton Smith [Paperback]

The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems of Clark Ashton Smith, edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, will please fans of the late bard of Auburndale. This popular edition includes all the scholarly apparatus one has come to expect from these editors, including a glossary, bibliography, index of titles and index of first lines, plus two color illustrations of Smith paintings.
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Clark Ashton Smith could well be considered one of the great poets of the twentieth century, and much of his verse explores the realms of fantasy, terror, wonder, and the supernatural. In this volume—the first major selection of Smith’s poetry in more than thirty years—editors S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz have presented an extensive array of poetic work that fully reveals Smith’s exotic language, imaginative range, and metrical precision. Including work from as early as the precocious Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912) and as late as the posthumously published The Hill of Dionysus (1962), The Last Oblivion features such celebrated works as "Nero," "Ode to the Abyss," and Smith’s exquisite elegies to his mentor George Sterling and to his colleague in fantasy, H. P. Lovecraft. Poems on Zothique, Averoigne, and Atlantis, realms in which many of his prose tales are set, are also featured. More than two dozen unpublished or uncollected poems, never previously included in any of Smith’s books, make The Last Oblivion a must for Smith devotees. Two full-color illustrations by Clark Ashton Smith and an exhaustive glossary of unusual words and names used in Smith’s poetry enhance the volume.

Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) has attained celebrity as the author of more than 100 evocative tales of fantasy and horror, collected in such volumes as Out of Space and Time and The Abominations of Yondo. His Selected Poems (1971) includes a substantial proportion of his verse, but much remains uncollected. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz are leading authorities on Smith, H. P. Lovecraft, and their circle. Among their numerous publications are Hippocampus Press editions of Lovecraft’s The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature (2000) and The Shadow out of Time (2001).