For more than fifty years, Donald Sidney-Fryer has been exhibiting his profound and wide-ranging sensitivity to all forms of art--music, painting, sculpture, ballet, and most of all, poetry. In this new collection of previously uncollected and unpublished essays, Sidney-Fryer displays the wealth of knowledge and the keen critical judgment he has developed in a lifetime of immersion in the fine arts.

The book opens with a fascinating diary-essay recounting a trip Sidney-Fryer took to El Salvador in 2016, in the company of master painter Jesse Allen, whose murals are described...