A HAND TO HOLD: Three Dramas in Verse, by Tony Howarth

Publication Date: August 15, 2022

Paperback, 88 pages

ISBN: 978-1-956782-15-8

$25.00 retail, $18.50 from publisher

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.

Praise for Tony Howard & A Hand to Hold

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

About the Author

Tony Howarth, editor for dramatic writing with The Westchester Review, is a playwright, director, former journalist, retired in 1991 after twenty-eight years as a high school and college teacher of English and theatre. William Wordsworth helped him survive adolescence, inspired him to write poetry of his own, but as as a college freshman he found a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused did not fit well in a climate devoted to the work of Eliot and Pope. He adjusted his ambitions to journalism, in Cleveland; Meriden, Connecticut; the US Army; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Indianapolis; and New York City, where he was editor of the editorial page of The World-Telegram and Sun. Disillusioned after a printers’ strike and the assasination of John F. Kennedy, he turned to teaching, where he was asked to develop a theatre program, which in turn led to a list of professional credits, including a dozen plays and a musical presented off-Broadway; full lengths include Thornwood, which won a Drama League grant, produced at Circle Rep and the Mint Theatre in New York City, colleges across the U.S., Amsterdam, Tanzania, made into an award-winning indie film, Slings and Arrows. For many summers he directed musicals at the College Light Opera Company in Falmouth, Massachusetts. He began writing poetry again in 2009 after a visit to Wordworth’s Dove Cottage (clouds and daffodils) in England’s Lake District. His poetry, developed at the Hudson Valley Writing Center under the treasured guidance of Jennifer Franklin and Fred Marchant, has appeared in many magazines, among them Chronogram, The Naugatuck River Review, a magazine in England Obsessed with Pipework, The Connecticut River Review, Raven’s Perch, The Sow’s Ear, and the Grayson Press anthology Forgotten Women. And a play published by The Westchester Review called The Wedding Ring, a moment in the life of who else but William Wordsworth. Wild Man of the Mountain, his first drama in verse, was published by Broadstone Books in 2021.