Bøker av Liam Guilar

"A Man of Heart, the second part of A Presentment of Englishry, is the story of Vortigern and the end of Roman Britain. It is also a story about story-telling. It continues to follow the narrative trajectory of Läamon's late 12th-century version of The Legendary History, the foundation myth of Britain. By the 12th century this had very little in common with 'History' as we understand it in the 21st. Attempts to resolve the discrepancies or reconcile Läamon's version with what we currently know about the period are futile. Nor is it possible to rationalize the chronology. There are anachronisms, contradictions and inconsistencies in my text. It is not a modern novel." -Liam Guilar"The deconstructionist view of there being no single attainable truth about the past is worth bearing in mind as we become immersed in Liam Guilar's moving reconstruction of the land called Britain in the long-gone world of the 11th and 12th centuries: there are merely the histories which people tell to empower themselves in the present. This is of course applicable both to history and to memory since everything we see is filtered through our present-day mental lenses and we interpret the past in the light of what we have now become.[...] Liam Guilar's reconstruction of the foundations of our past is a con-vincing sift of details that offers the reader a 'morning familiar as cold stone' with 'Rain drifting through the smoke hole in the roof'." -Ian Brinton, Long Poem Magazine

A sequence of poems about the City of Coventry, moving from the historical Godgifu and her husband Earl Leofric, via the legend of Godiva to the present day.From reviews of the first edition:'Guilar has brought together a cast of characters that speak out of history and from the present time, real people who live and breathe with engaging frankness. They are varied in personality, held here in small jewels of poetry that sparkle with wit and strength. These are people worth meeting'.Joanna M. Weston Poetryreview Ca.'I am impressed by the writing, which demands full and careful attention. To read these poems, the reader must inhabit the world, or the voices, of the writing; must engage with the rhythms, and the spare poetic structures. The poems are conversational, in the sense that they are made to be read aloud as well as on the page; but their sometimes declaratory structures are tight and taut without being confining'.Bronwyn Levy Review of Lady Godiva and Me. Text

'Are you English?' is never a neutral question. In the 11th century a `Presentment of Englishry' was the offering of proof that a dead man was English and therefore unimportant. In the 12th century a priest living in Areley Regis, set out to `tell the noble deeds of the English - no one knows why he chose to write his poem in English.