Wild Man of the Mountain: A Drama in Verse - by Tony Howarth

Publication Date: December 1, 2021

Paperback, 48 pages

ISBN: 978-1-937968-94-6

$20.00 retail, 15.00 from publisher

It should come as no surprise that Tony Howarth’s debut poetry chapbook takes the form of a “drama in verse,” for it draws on his considerable experience in the theater. Or that his attention to fine detail and compact narrative reflect his background as a journalist. His years as an educator show in the lessons here about human nature and the values of empathy and kindness. But with this book he now firmly adds poet to his list of achievements. In a brief span of pages he brings to life the outsider artist Dag, and Molly, the owner of the diner where Dag finds both coffee (with milk, three sugars) but more importantly, understanding. Like Dag creating his art from refuse, Howarth creates an entire world out of the fragments of Dag’s life. As Dag struggles to create his art and his life, he finds another companion in the sculpture of a broken angel; but it is Dag himself who is the broken angel of this story, a spirit unsuited to life in our fallen world, but perhaps one who redeems us through his art and his example.

Praise for Tony Howarth & Wild Man of the Mountain

In his most famous work, Proust wrote, “The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Tony Howarth, in everything he writes, provides his readers with new eyes. Wild Man of the Mountain proves that Howarth is a master of empathy and imagination in equal measure. This original hybrid work—part poem, part play—mines the struggles and triumphs of a brilliant outsider artist to exemplify one of the greatest gifts art gives us—a window into the unique mind of another. In creating a deeply human character who lives on the edge of society and sanity, Howarth holds a mirror up to the creative impulses that reside in each of us as we struggle to create a self in our culture of late-stage capitalism.

—Jennifer Franklin, author of No Small Gift (Four Way Books)

Tony Howarth’s Dag, his “wild man of the mountain” is an eccentric who collects the “stuff” he finds as he wanders his town and region. As Dag says, he takes the various objects he finds and makes them “whole again” and “belong somewhere.” Howarth’s lyrical drama about Dag’s assemblages takes us right to the heart of why we make art and what it gives us back in return. Out of a discarded ashtray, an abandoned bicycle wheel, and some jelly jars and umbrellas, someone as devoted and determined as Dag might just create something that tells us who we are.

—Fred Marchant, author of Said Not Said (Graywolf Press)

About the Author

Tony Howarth, editor for dramatic writing with The Westchester Review, is a playwright, director, former journalist, retired in 1991 after 28 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 CT, the US. Army, Lancaster PA, 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 assassination 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 MA. 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.