Reviews/Comments | Frank Coffman Writer

Frank Coffman may be retired from teaching English, Journalism, and Creative Writing, but he still has a great deal to teach today's poets and lovers of the weird. This collection of 266 examples of his work runs the gamut of formal styles, a master class on the form and technique of poetry. In a time when poetry is rarely taught to any great depth in most English and writing courses, it is an education in itself to encounter triversens, Rubiaiyat sonnets, ballads, sonnetku, megasonnets, microsonnets, acrostics, free verse, ae freslighe, Sapphics, rondines, and many more.
Even for those not particularly interested in the technical excellence of the forms, the imagery and content of the verses are well worth an evening's perusal. Poetry has always played an intrinsic part in weird and horror fiction, and Coffman's poems are devoted to necromancy, werewolves, horrors nameless and visceral, old houses and fresh curses, witches and warlocks, vampires, ghouls, Lovecraftian horrors, and rarer critters...
...and of course, there is an entire chapter devoted to All Hallow's Eve. It is, I think, a rare fan of the genre who would not appreciate cracking open their hornbook on a Hallowe'en night, as the darkness closes in and the trick-or-treaters wander home, perhaps a glass of wine or whiskey at hand, to read "It Is Halloween" or "The Offering."
There are homages too: poems dedicated to Weird Tales and Boris Karloff, Robert E. Howard and William Hope Hodgson,, Lovecraft and Poe, Donald Sidney-fryer and Mary Shelley's famous monster.
Some of these poems have been published, in the pages of Spectral Realms and other journals, but this is the first time they have all been collected here...and I feel that this book could serve as a primer for poets of the weird, both to get an idea of what can be done with form, and how to do it.

Praise for Black Flames & Gleaming Shadows

from Adam Bolivar, poet of The Lay of Old Hex and A Wheel of Ravens.

Poets who write capably in rhyme and meter are as rare as hen's teeth. But the sonnets of one who has mastered the mechanics of meter will ring like a well-tuned musical instrument. You will find such sonnets here, as well as more exotic verse-beasts: the shadorma, the pentina, the rondeau and (the poet's own invention) the trisengraf.

To paraphrase Augustus Caaesar: a radish may know no poetry, but Frank Coffman does.

The addition of this volume to one's library is sure to enhance one's appreciation for the lyric arts."

On Eclipse of the Moon from the back cover of that book

from Master Bard, Donald Sidney-Fryer

in a Review of my work in Spectral Realms 14

Unlike so many poets, if not most, restricted to the one string on their lyre of horror or the supernatural, Frank Coffman…has many strings to his lyre.… His major collection, The Coven's Hornbook & Other Poems, alerted us to a major new voice in imaginative poetry.… As anyone who has experienced his work knows for a fact, [he] is a master poet, a wizard of rime, meter, and form. Truly a grand and glorious traditionalist.

Review of The Exorcised Lyric (collaboration of Frank Coffman and Steven Withrow) by Kyla Lee Ward, award-winning poet and author from Australia.

The voice of doom proves surprisingly lyrical in this collection from Frank Coffman and Steven Withrow. Including works by both and bookended by two magnificent collaborations, it is a tour de force of contemporary formalism as well as speculative poetry.
The titular piece comprises a tale of possession or haunting, with a flavour very much of M. R. James (To James is dedicated Withrow's sonnet "A Means of Summoning"). Set in 1901, treating of religious doubt, it is nonetheless contemporary in its assemblage. There is a sonnet sequence covering the central events, the notes of a contemporary scholar studying the verse in question, the "possessed" poem and a reconstruction of the original. The whole provides a glimpse into the science and discipline of poetry, as well as what may have been an incursion by otherworldly forces. In my opinion, these ten pages would earn their place in any anthology of traditional ghost stories.
Twenty new verses by Withrow follow. As demonstrated in previous collections such as The Bedlam Philharmonic & Other Poems (Lulu 2020), he is a storyteller with an eye for flawed characters who suffer grotesque, yet befitting fates. Some are amusing pieces of grue, like "The Unruffled Man", or surreal evocations such as "The Burning Man". But in the likes of "Housewife's Lament: Wartime" and "Goblin's Nest", he creates moments of compassion and beauty.
Coffman contributes twenty pieces of his own. The tone, overall, is bleaker, concerning the passage of time and cosmic entities over and above the fates of individuals. But the author of The Coven's Hornbook & Other Poems (Bold Venture Press, 2019) and Black Flames & Gleaming Shadows (Bold Venture Press 2020) throws in a few weird beasts like the Chickcharney for good measure ("The Blue Holes of Andros"). His "Ouroboros" charts the twists and turns of a universal symbol, while the section concludes with another exorcism, that of the piquant "La Villa Infestada".
The concluding work, the six part "Toward Solstice Station", is as astounding in concept as in execution. The motif of a family journeying from east to west is refracted into a meditation on American history, taking in seven lifetimes and two planets, as time and distance morph like Einstein's train paradox. As society and technology change, the father's refrain of "what the country needs" is met by the mother's "but where will this lead?". As the daughter reaches toward the future in her own way, dreaming of fairies and fossils, and eventually of "hilly, chilly, /Rust-hued-dust-storm-two-moon Mars,". Cast in Pushkin sonnets (a form created by the Russian author for his epic Eugene Onegin), the effect is superb.
For a volume containing so many grisly fates and dire predictions, The Exorcised Lyric is a lively and thoughtful read, as well as being a treasury of poetic style. The virtuosity with which these two cast sonnets, couplets, quatrains and even rarer forms, as vessels for their wild ideas, is all the justification such an experiment requires. Trimmed with illustrations by Mutartis Boswell, this book is a delight.