UK fans are in for a treat–Mike Chivers, moderator of the Official Robert E. Howard forum, has alerted us to a new troika of books by the Weird Tales Trinity coming soon from PS Publishing:

Of course, it’s now less than six months to the World Horror Convention, to be held this year in the delightful southern England coastal town of Brighton (for which, I’m sure, you have already booked, yes?!). Well, as usual, we’re going to be launching some great new books there and we’ll pass along progress updates as soon as we have them.

But the big news is that we’re aiming to add a poetry imprint to the PS stable, and we’ll be doing a second launch event specifically for those. The flagship book will be Jo Fletcher’s as yet untitled anthology, a baker’s dozen celebrating the dark side of the seaside.

This will be supported by a triptych of volumes compiled and edited by Steve Jones and containing the complete Weird Tales poetry of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith… and all of them priced at just £9.99 each. Watch this space!

Exciting news: the prose of Howard, Smith and Lovecraft is well represented in the UK, but I always felt the poetry could use a little more exposure. There’s certainly no dearth of material, in fact, I can only guess how many poems they could fit in to three books! The fact that Steve Jones is editing is just the icing on the cake, and I’ve no doubt he’ll do a fine job.

The question, now, is what verses will appear. Ideally, every one of the authors’ poems would be featured, but the three musketeers have such vast libraries that it would be very unlikely.

It’s presumable that Howard’s volume will only contain his weird poems: “The Ride of Falume,” “The Song of a Mad Minstrel,” “A Word from the Outer Dark” and the like. I’d guess that poems linked to his most famous sons would also be included: “Cimmeria,” “The King and the Oak,” “Song of the Race,” “The One Black Stain,” “The Return of Sir Richard Grenville,” and “Solomon Kane’s Homecoming.”

Smith’s will be more difficult, as just about his entire poetic ouvre could be classed as “weird”: I dearly hope some of my favourites like “The Hashish Eater – Or – The Apocalypse of Evil,” “Lament of the Stars,” “The Titans in Tartarus,” “The Sea-Gods” and “The Song of the Worlds” will make it in. Lovecraft is in a similar boat: “Fungi from Yuggoth” alone would account for a substantial portion. Still, it’s reasonable that his best known verse like “The Cats,” “Providence,” “The House,” “Festival,” and “The City” will appear.

Until then, I’ll be reading some of my old favourites, eagerly awaiting its release.