Coming this fall from Northwoods Press:

WHAT ROUGH BEAST,

a winner of the 2002 Conservatory of American Letters Poetry Contest, is a selection of poems by the great Irish poet, Sean O'Shawn, originally introduced to American readers in the article "The Irish Genius", by O'Shawn aficionado and film director, Woody Allen, and included in his bestselling anthology, Without Feathers. What Rough Beast is edited by S. M. Hall III of Tampa, Florida.

Taken as a whole, Mr. Hall's selection of poems, and his introductory and concluding materials, offer a compelling portrait of this great and tormented craftsman in words, whose greatest loves were
his mother, his wife, vacuum cleaners, and immersing "his arm in custard on a moonlit night".

The postscript to this collection is some of the editor's own work, including a short verse play about paddling in the sea because his other work suggested by Mr. Allen's canon is not in verse.

S. M. Hall III lived in Maine from 1977 to 2000. He graduated from The University of Southern Maine in 1989, and he has been published about eighty times in all genres.

Praise for Mr. Hall's Previous Work:

"Woody Allen is to you what S. J. Perelman was to me." - Martin Dibner (1911-1992), Novelist

"(About chapbook entitled The Rising Ivory Mount He Scaled) the poems . . . crafted, clever and penetrating." - Richard Lederer (as seen on Oprah!), author of Looking at Language

"A flash of lightning from Mt. Aristophanes" - The Sow's Ear Poetry Review

"Written, not in ink, but in the milk of human kindness" - Ayn Rand (1906-1982)

"Otto Tittsling?" - Peter Schickele (compiler of the works of P. D. Q. Bach)