The Dandy Poems and His Little Theatres

By Toma

The Dandy Poems and his Little Theatres charts a boy’s first love through its many stages. Each sonnet and poem is presented as a little theater of its own but can be read as one work through one man’s escapades through admiration, love, loss, attraction, separation, exasperation, and the ultimate devotion to another’s spirit. The reader experiences the many shades, half light and dark of metaphor, allusion, and figurative language as well as the musicality of words spun within a mostly poetic, sonnet framework.

An additional poem, Return to Pangaea is also included, a sci-fi epic poem that speaks to democracy, the environment, the American social landscape, and rubs against current mores.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483575353

Book preview

ALSO BY TOMA

Published projects on air, in print:

Various poetry in small chapbooks both here and abroad

Poetry in Richmond Magazine

Like Father Like Daughter Essay Interview (NPR)

Various Poetry readings (NPR)

To a Teacher Virginia Writing

Songs

Various artwork (pen, pencil, mouse art) in print, poster

PROGRESSING PROJECTS

Out of the Marvelous (LP)

Edgewater (LP)

Wonderbread Man (novel)

Nedlaw, (essay)

Random Daguerreotypes (short story collection)

Flower Childe (children’s story)

Various children’s books

Various artworks

INTERNET

Facebook: Tomasongs

Soundcloud: Under Tom MacDonald (TOMA), poems

Bandmix: WhistleStop

Reverbnation: WhistleStop

Spotify: WhistleStop

Dedicated to Kay, Sarah, Mitchell, and family

Copyright © 2016 Tom MacDonald

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions in any form whatsoever.

Cover Page taken from The Dandy Portraits, The Coursing Macaroni, Published Nov. 19, 1772, M. Darby, 39, Strand, facsimiles by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and sold by Dietz Press.

All images courtesy of the author. Return to Pangaea cover artwork from 1990’s HP clipart.

Published by Generation Infinity, LLC.

Edited by Mr. Ralph McLean Angell, Jr.

Design by Kyle Schlesinger.

ISBN: 978-1-4835753-5-3

TOMA is a product of both public and private schools both here and abroad. His father, an introspective, prolific reader of books, had volumes of books throughout the house, vinyl album collections, and could, more times than not, be found reading in his chair on a nightly basis. His mother of Mexican-American descent, always had the stereo on playing radio station top 40 hits or songs from the Fifties. Books, language, music, sport were part of the fabric of his early life.

As a student, he excelled in middle school in the arts and sports, but as he moved to high school, arts were

left behind him as he says, left in some guidance counselor’s folder was the blueprint for my future, all but forgotten in a school house dungeon among a phalanx of broken, metal file cabinets.

He grew up in Rockville, Maryland in the suburbs. At the University of Maryland, he floundered for two years taking courses by following the herd: business, accounting, politics, until he landed within the English Department in a place that was both inspiring and productive. Taking courses from many genres and disciplines: short story, Shakespeare, American Theater Playwrights, poetry, creative writing, Romantics, Victorian Age, Dickens, Early America, he found his niche and began finding a voice, and a comfort zone in an area where he had latent talents though art like a ghost kept dragging him along to unknown places, and continued to prey on his mind. He often spent time in the music department, set himself outside and inside the Architecture and Art buildings. He felt fortunate to have such impassioned although aloof English professors who gave him an opportunity to live among stories in a wide range of literature while writing papers that suited his temperament.

In his Twenties, he spent time working at the World Trade Center, 97th floor with a Big 8 Management Consulting firm as he inserts, where he took Latin in night school along with his trips between offices in New York and Washington, D.C. Later he worked abroad in Brussels, Belgium for two and half years as an English teacher and English language instructor to foreigners, before returning to America to study at the University of Richmond for his Masters in Teaching. He then worked in Virginia public schools as a teacher then through to central office before leaving for a position with