The first full-length collection from poetry/playwright Tony Howarth, three stylistically and thematically diverse dramas linked by the power of basic human decency to change lives.

Journalist turned educator turned playwright turned poet Tony Howarth is on a mission to restore the grand tradition of verse drama. In his first full-length collection, consisting of three plays, a man helps a girl escape forced marriage and sexual bondage in John Smith's despotic colonial Virginia; the poet Anna Akhmatova communes with other women waiting outside a Leningrad prison in Stalinist Russia; and in the present day, a man who first lost his father to childhood divorce and distance deals with the anguish of losing him again in adulthood to the ravages of age and dementia. Composed in styles as diverse as their themes, what connects these three dramas is the power of basic human decency to change lives, of a caring hand to hold reaching out across the darkness.

Tony Howarth's ability to evoke different eras in different styles is more than just a virtuoso performance. Each verse drama is heart rending, perfectly realized and in language so beautiful it takes the breath away. His 'Fragile souls joining hands in a lonely world, ' reach out to us across space and time. Grab hold!--John MacLean, author of The Long Way Home

In language both lyrical and dramatic, reminiscent, in places, of Robert Browning's monologues, and in other moments of Louis Simpson's plain-spoken narrative poetry, Tony Howarth dismantles the myths of history and memory, country and family. He transports the reader from seventeenth-century Virginia to Russia in Akhmatova's time to the tender and agonizing complexities of the present. Always, in these thought-provoking, moving verse dramas, life's hardships are met with quiet heroism. This is poetry under pressure, in the best sense, forging new forms.--Tracy Daugherty, author of Snow and Straw

Poetry. Drama. History. Family & Relationships.