Liam Guilar's Blog

 This book tells the stories of Charlotte Bronte’s last years and the writing of Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography. Unusually, Watson takes the command ‘show don’t tell’ and applies it to the writing of a biography, narrating events, but leaving his readers to draw their own conclusions. The style, with its obsession with the weather, hard journeys, long descriptions of the interior of houses, lingering descriptions of death bed details, and the portrayal of his characters as martyrs, echoes the novels of his protagonists. 

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Perhaps after all, the truth about Charlotte Bronte was just as Elizabeth expected from the moment she had met her seven years earlier: that after a life time of emotional starvation and grief, one of the most talented women of her generation was harried and manipulated by the men around her into their serf, that her wish for concord, balance and stability had been exploited into defeated compromise by all those who needed none and, broken in spirit, she crawled, she knelt, then she tremulously stood until the hammer blows of tragedy rained upon her again (p. 231).

 It's a fine paragraph. It epitomises a version of Charlotte’s life.  It also reveals what’s wrong with this book. Charlotte is often, as here, presented as a victim. But her life is not all that different to thousands of women of her class, in her position. They served as governesses, and hated it. They worked as teachers when they didn’t want to in a system that ground down teachers and pupils. They looked after widowed fathers or unmarried brothers because their society had no other outlet for them.  And compared to millions living in the new urban slums, her life was one of genteel ease. Howarth parsonage was not an isolated place on the moors. There were people in the village. If the Brontes didn’t want to socialise with people they thought of as inferior that was their choice. 

“One of the Most talented women of her generation”. One of the most talented writers perhaps, but Charlotte and her sisters were lucky to be talented in a way their culture found acceptable for women. Women who might have been talented in other ways had no chance. There were no doctors, or lawyers. Universities were barred to them, the visual arts and music were difficult to access. ‘Harried and manipulated’ are value judgements this book doesn’t investigate. After the publication of Jane Eyre doors opened in the literary world she and her sisters had dreamt about. That she couldn’t walk through doesn’t mean they weren’t open. 

Specific to this book is that ‘perhaps’ which begins the sentence.

In a book about ‘The invention of Charlotte Bronte’ you might expect some analysis of this ‘truth’, or some attempt to see how such a story came to dominate alternative ones. Watson offers no such analysis.

If you’re looking for some new information or insight into Charlotte’s life, or Gaskell’s biography, there isn’t any. The perspective provided by over a century of fossicking in the small details of Charlotte’s life is missing. The material has been picked over since Charlotte’s death. The essential debates: was Cowan bridge school a nightmare; was Charlotte’s childhood as grim as she presented it, what exactly was her relationship with three men: her father, her husband, and her Belgian Professor? If you’re waiting for a verdict, a weighing of the evidence, or even a statement of the current consensus, you will be disappointed. The book is happy to narrate. 

The subtitle of the book points to its structural flaw. It has two halves, and they don’t seem to have been introduced to each other. Logically, Charlotte’s relationship with her future biographer could be the subject of the first half, but Gaskell fades in and out and it’s padded with familiar stories from her last few years. The only coherence is chronological. The second part details the writing of Gaskell’s biography and its immediate reception. Presumably this is the ‘scandal that made her’ though it could be argued Jane Eyre deserves that title. The jacket blurb hints at ‘Illicit love’. 

The title suggests the ‘real Charlotte’ has gone missing, has been recreated out of the facts as a figure that that isn’t ‘factual’, but there’s no analysis to distinguish between  ‘truth’ and ‘invention’. 

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What the book does, perhaps inadvertently, is demonstrate the problems of writing a biography and the dangers of using biography to illuminate a writer’s work. 

Charlotte and her sisters wrote fiction. They took the material available and transmuted it into novels that people are still reading and admiring over a century and a half later. For Charlotte, her version of her childhood gave her material for Jane Eyre. What should matter for fiction is what she did with her memories, not how accurate the memories were.  

Since the publication of Jane Eyre, people have been rummaging through Charlotte’s books in search of ‘the originals’ for places, characters and incidents. The search has fuelled, and been fuelled by, a Bronte industry with Howarth its official shine and the sisters as secular martyrs. 

The Wikipedia entry for William Carus Wilson bluntly states:

William Carus Wilson was an English churchman and the founder and editor of the long-lived monthly The Children's Friend. He was the inspiration for Mr Brocklehurst, the autocratic head of Lowood School, depicted by Charlotte Brontë in her 1847 novel Jane Eyre.

Jane Eyre was published as an autobiography ‘edited by Currer Bell’. But the literary game Charlotte was playing became a stick to beat her art and her books even when the pretence was dropped. The desire of readers to track down ‘originals’ suggests an inability or reluctance to accept fiction as invention, and a preference for gossip and scandal over the pleasures of reading. Or perhaps suggests gossip and scandal were as much an essential part of the pleasures of reading fiction over 150 years ago as they seem to be today. 

Readers will  either be convinced imaginatively by the horrors of Lowood school and repelled by the bigoted hypocrisy of Mr. Brocklehurst or dismiss both as incredible. What or who these were ‘based’ on is irrelevant. Fiction is a culturally sanctioned form of lying.  For a reader who thinks Lowood and Brocklehurst are overdone, being told that they are based on Cowan Bridge and William Carus Wilson, and both were that bad in reality doesn’t make the portrait any more believable. It just adds a qualification: this is unconvincing even if it’s based on real people and places. 

Once the game of ‘who is based on whom’ was underway the ‘public truth’ mattered for the owners of Cowan Bridge school, or William Carus Wilson and his son, or the Hegers, and for Mr. Bronte. Madame Heger may have resented Charlotte not because she suspected she was having an affair with her husband but because the identification of her school with the one in Villette ruined the school.  

The factual, provable truth, matters for a biographer. But often it’s not possible to establish it beyond doubt. Charlotte’s relationship with Monsieur Heger. Was their relationship sexual? Was it reciprocal? Or did Charlotte invest her imagination in a fantasy that was never requited? 

Who was Charlotte Bronte? There are versions of her, there were versions of her even in her own lifetime. Is ‘the truth’ the point where all the versions overlap, the total of them all, or one out of the many? Watson implies Charlotte was trying to control the narrative, telling the story of her harsh childhood and schooling to everyone who listened. She tried to control the reception of her sisters’ work when their books were posthumously reissued. She was determined to establish her version.

Gaskell had met Charlotte and was able to interview many of the key characters in her life. She struggled to find objective truth, dealing with perception, memory and bias. Eyewitnesses did not remember or remembered and then recanted. Others didn’t feel able to speak publicly about what they knew.  

When Gaskell started to read her correspondence, she discovered that Charlotte presented a different version of herself to different correspondents. Each batch ‘presented to her a different woman, remade to something more agreeable than Charlotte felt herself to be from each of her contacts’. One of those contacts, Harriet Martineau, reading Charlotte’s letter to others, ‘concluded Charlotte had been disingenuous’. Others called her a pathological liar. 

The problem of the truth wouldn’t go away. The story of Branwell’s ‘affair’ with his employer’s wife required tact as the lady in question was still alive. There were versions but who to believe: Branwell? Charlotte? The wife? Even at the time establishing the truth of what happened was impossible. 

Watson tends to present Elizabeth Gaskell in a positive light, but she must have known that ‘telling the truth’ would hurt people who were alive. Some of Charlotte’s friends encouraged this as a form of second hand revenge, but the publisher’s lawyers were always going to be nervous and the second edition of the life was suitably altered. 

For anyone who deals with time periods much earlier than the 19th century, it’s a common thought that if only more information survived, we could know the characters in our histories so much better. In an absence of diaries, letters, journals, the testimony of people who knew our subjects, they are often little more than a name and some dates. 

What this book shows is that even with an abundance of evidence, even when the eye- witnesses and participants can be interviewed, beyond the dates and places, ‘who was Charlotte Bronte’ was not and is not a simple question. 

That thought has to undermine any approach to her fiction, or anyone else’s, which justifies itself by recourse to biography. We can know Jane Eyre, because all the information about her is in the book that bears her name. We cannot know Charlotte Bronte with similar confidence. Trying to use Charlotte’s life to illuminate her novels is using one fiction to read another.

The Wrong Fairytale

Behind each ornate door 

a princess waits

to hear the words 

that set her free.

As you pass along 

the shadowed corridors

dragging your chains 

voices call your name 

rising and falling like the sea.

Born to the tidal pull of this task 

you studied the ritual; 

rehearsed the aftermath.

While they perfected themselves: 

brushed their hair

practised their songs

waiting for this day.

Now desire prowls on sharpened claws, 

but in your mouth 

the magic words are wrong. 

The doors stay shut. 

Step out into sunlight

to the skin tightening kiss 

of the cold sea air.

You’ll count the pebbles on the beach 

before you understand

why your shackles fell away.

Because sometimes you think you're in one story and you know the rules, discover you're not, and realise the discovery is painful but liberating?

This poem was first published in Rough Spun to Close Weave. Copies of the book are available from the shop at  www.liamguilar.com

(Planxty: Dublin 2005) 

The high note, held, stretching

the space above the drone;

like wind torn spray

as the great wave, darkening, builds;

wailing like the curve of the bay, 

lean as famine, leaning into 

the blurred percussion 

of Atlantic rollers, coming home  

across unfathomable depth,

to crash onto the present

this cargo of raw, wounded memory. 

Like a window blasted open,

the music admits the smell of rain

drumming on the shuttered house. 

Where the locals never learn to spell 

the migrant’s name, the dancers stamp and call,

while by the fire, whiskey and stories

blur in customary gestures.

Laughter and exuberance, suspended

without resolution, above 

a strained and ruined loneliness.

Written after listening to Liam O'Flynn playing solo at Planxty's concert in Dublin in 2005.

This poem originally published in Rough Spun to close Weave.

Details can be found at WWW.liamguilar.com

We've found another body! Cut

to cleavage shots of fine young animal:

bare shoulders, swinging breasts,

definitely female. Adult, young,

still fertile. On her knees, undressing

bones; the mouth gapes and the skull,

turned sideways, concentrates

upon the probing knife.

Fade in the expert to explain

what is revealed: age

in the worn tooth. A woman,

by her pelvis.  Cause of death?

A subject for some further tests.

Linger on the living now,

back in the ditch, tanned flesh,

strong legs .  We learn so much

about a culture from the way it treats a body.

The way it is displayed for viewing

reveals the truth of what is valued.

I used to watch a famous television program devoted to archaeology. This was the reason i stopped. 

The poem is taken from 'Rough Spun to Close Weave'.  Copies and other samples available from www.liamguilar.com

A version of this poem was originally published in Meniscus. It was an early attempt   to write fiction in verse. After the poem, you can read Marcus Bales' parody.

Three Act Play.

1) Hotel Interior, Night

You were with me in the darkness, curled

on the unfamiliar bed. The nightlights

of the hotel swimming pool shimmering the room; 

the sound of surf shivering the air. 

Another dream, perhaps, until your nightmare 

shook us both awake. I held you safe until 

your breathing steadied, gentled, signaled 

you had gone far out to calmer water

where stars were fixed and distant.

The rain began, hesitant and then insistent. 

Awake alone, admiring the angle of your shoulder 

the shadows on your back. Although 

come dawn, you’d turn, smile, welcome me, 

everything we did was broken light

dancing on that isolation flesh tries to deny. 

2) Exterior: Early Morning Bus Stop Philosophy 

You left while I was sleeping. Who knows when we’ll meet again?

So consider the mini bus that will take me to the airport,

stopped at the traffic lights. How many centuries of ingenuity

produced this banal sight? Still too asleep to fumble my itinerary 

I stare out towards the estuary, imagine a rough man knapping flint,

lurching towards comfort. He could not have imagined

the bakery, the weight loss-center, gym and launderette. 

the twisted perfume of a cigarette, the woman smiling at her phone.

He’d know the wind and tide, that space where light and water 

meet and never merge but did he understand ‘alone’?

3) Domestic Interior: Evening Rush Hour. 

A good day’s work, first home, now dinner’s done. So why

do I imagine a pond too dark to fathom, beneath bare trees;

imagine being dragged down through surface scum of leaves, down 

past drowned and damaged faces adrift in the darkening cold?

Unnoticed daylight is reduced to silvered remnants on a table set for two.

Outside the traffic that she’s stuck in is a wall of noise, inside, 

fear, rising from the shadows to the dark.  

In the street, their day reflected in the way they stride  

or slouch or pause to window shop, parents sheepdog children, 

school kids shoal, all moving to and from but moving on. 

I watch them from the kitchen window, reassured and surfacing,

waiting for her footsteps on the path; the way she struggles with the lock

the way she calls me from the hall before she shuts the door,

starting the ripples which will carry us towards  morning.

If Liam Guilar had written 'I will Survive'. By MARCUS BALES

You left while I was sleeping: no goodbye 

As bad as any talk or any note, 

Because in any case I had no vote, 

And even you could not illumine why. 

I think of how a rough man knapping flint 

Inching towards comfort, could not have thought

Of memory-foam. What he knew was taught 

By close attention to each tiny hint. 

And now you're back that look upon your face 

Which once you knew that I could not resist 

Me wondering what tiny hint I've missed 

But no. Go out the door. There is no place 

For you here any more. I knap this stone 

And wonder, did that rough man know alone?

A longer version of this essay was first published in the Brazen Head as  The Watchful Muse clicking the link will take you there. 

With a Stranger’s Eyes is Jeremy Hooker’s third book of poems since the publication of Selected Poems 1965-2018(Shearsman 2020) and arguably the best of this later group1. The poetry is divided into three sections, with a fourth, short prose ‘Reflections on Two Welsh Words.’ The first two sections record people, places and incidents from his past and present in non-English speaking countries, moving from memories of Holland to Wales, to a final section which looks outwards. The poet moves from being a stranger by nature of nationality and language, to a stranger in the world by reason of being human. The title reflects Hooker’s sense of not belonging. “I am a stranger in the area in which I live, and a stranger to the tragic history of the area. Being a stranger has affected my idea of myself as a poet (p.83).”2This awareness saves the poems from sentimentality and egotism. 

If we include 2016’s Ancestral Lines, then these four poetry books are what used to be called ‘a significant and important body of work,’ in their own right, because of the way they explore a maze of writing problems and offer one way out.

Hooker has quoted David Jones’ “one writes with the things at one’s disposal” which seems incontrovertible. However, biography is one of those things, and if biography is what makes writers who they are, then how do they write autobiographically without falling into the trap of producing something that is either private or, perhaps, worse, a lyric poem that begins and ends with the egotistical /I/? Hooker describes the problem: “I distrust the autobiographical impulse with its temptation to egotism and assumptions of finality. […] nostalgia came with a horror of being stuck in an idealised version of the past.” (‘A Note on Autobiographical Poetry’, Preludes p. 79).” 

The danger becomes more pressing for a man in his eighties, who has reached a time in his life when looking back seems inevitable. Ancestral Lines was Hooker’s direct confrontation with the problems of writing autobiographically. In ‘Lyric of Being’ the essay that ends that book, he wrote: “My concept of the poet was that of one who struggled to keep open a channel between self and the world and the living and the dead, as opposed to writing a verse beginning and ending with the self (Ancestral lines p.76).” 

In ‘Reflections on Two Welsh Words’, Hooker writes: “In tune with the thinking of modernists such as T.S. Eliot, David Jones, and George Oppen, I conceive of the poem as a made object, a thing that stands apart from the poet, an act in a transpersonal ‘conversation’ (p. 84).”

His poems have a conversational tone that only someone who is tone deaf would call artless. However, art as conversation means more than just tone. He has acknowledged his debt to Martin Buber’s I and Thou 3. According to Buber, the destructive tendency is to turn every ‘you’ into an ‘it,’ into something that can be instrumentalised, or used, or packaged – in poetic terms, to see oneself, like a Wordsworth, as the centre of the universe. The challenge, simplifying Buber, is to see and celebrate the other in all its specific otherness AND not lose the /I/ that is interacting with it. 4

In With a Stranger’s Eyes Hooker achieves a balance between the person writing and the subject of the writing. ‘Rowan Tree’ offers the most straightforward example. From Wales, or the Welsh poetic tradition, he took the idea of poetry as a vehicle for praise. ‘Rowan Tree’ is a song of praise but made new by the poet’s refusal to pretend the tree cares about him. 

It pleases me

that you are no thing

of words, but indifferent

to all I say or think.

Yet having contemplated the tree in all its seasonal and historical variations, the poem ends.

Rowan tree

that enchants my days

be to me, if only

in imagination, 

an old man’s staff.

Let me stand with you

against Atlantic gales.

Allow me to warm myself 

with your leaves’ red glow

against the coming cold.

To write about the tree is to acknowledge what the tree means to the writer. The difficulty is to see the subject not as an extension of self, but as something in relation to self. As he writes about people who were important to him, he preserves their essential strangeness while celebrating what they meant to him. 

But I will not insult the man

with elegy, or lessen his ferocity

with emollient words.

                        Let me see him

as the Jeremiah he was, 

                                    prophet

of the death we have dealt a nation,

and the doom we are bringing on our own.

                                                            ‘Gwenallt’

Living and working in Wales exacerbated the problem. Acutely conscious of his strangerhood, in a country whose language he didn’t master, Hooker was an unwilling representative of the race some of the Welsh writers he admired and championed saw justifiably as The Enemy. The pressure of this alterity may not be comfortable for the individual, but it is bracing for the poet. It acts against any tendency to ‘egotism and assumptions of finality.’ It makes nostalgia uncomfortable and reminds the poet of the difference between reality and any ‘idealised version of the past.’

The Welsh poetic tradition also began in commemoration. Hooker’s poems deal with places made memorable by the people he associates with them, or where tragedy happened. The poet commemorates by finding the image to bring events to the reader’s attention and understanding in ways that journalism cannot. In ‘Passing through Aberfan’, fourteen lines of understatement manage to capture the horror of an event that once reverberated through British culture. ‘On the Road to Senghenydd’ confronts the problem of writing about another, perhaps less well-known disaster.5

Do not imagine you can imagine it.

Do not suppose you know

what grief is, or terror, or courage

of men entering an inferno 

to rescue their kind. Today 

you may think the scene medieval,

like a picture of hell.

But you will know nothing

unless you catch a distant echo

from the very ground, where

a father calls for his son,

and a son cries for his father.

                                    ‘On the Road to Senghenydd’

Following Buber’s lead, the poems explore the rich variety of life. There is anger, and sadness, and humour. ‘Haunted House’ begins as any rural ghost story:

Children called it

the haunted house.

It may have been because 

an angry man lived here.

But the swerve at the end is both unexpected and highly effective. Made more so by the gentle ghost of Tennyson in the last line suggesting the rest of the quote.6

Whatever it was, I do not know

why children passed this house

with a tremor of fear.

What I do know are days and nights

when I would have given my life

to feel the touch of a ghostly hand. 

It’s easy to confuse ‘serious’ with humourless, but in Hooker’s case that would be a mistake. To be human the poems have to smile occasionally. 

But the artist’s soul was in it.

It wasn’t his fault

that he was a Victorian.  

                        ‘On the Painting called Peace’.

One of the ways out of the problem of the ego, is the figure of the man at the window. Looking outwards has been a common theme in Hooker’s recent books. Poems frame a space for thinking through and in language, inviting the reader to look and think again. As he writes in ‘David Jones at Capel-y-ffin’,

                        And yes, it is true
the universal is revealed
through the particular thing.

Seagulls have been the subject of several memorable Hooker poems. 

Gull, gull,

lover of sea

and rubbish dump

devotee of plough

take me with you,

the observer asks,

                        let me share

a world that is alive, 

where sea roughens

with flying spume

under the west wind.

                        ‘Man at a window: six observations.’

If you live on the coast no poem can make you see seagulls ‘for the first time’. But a poem can colour the way you see them, so the irritating cacophonous chip scavengers will never be the same again.

‘Man at a Window: six observations’ ends the book. The sixth poem offers an image that might stand for Hooker and his most recent work. The Man at the Window is alone, separated from what he’s observing, but not trying to conscript what he sees to his own purposes, while celebrating what he sees and what it evokes for him.7 It begins:

One bright star

solitary, it seems 

in the whole night sky.

Not knowing the star’s name it reminds him of

[…] the young poet
who never died, but lives
steadfast,
for the holiness that is love.

You might miss the allusions to Keats, you might think the ‘young poet’ is the poet’s younger self, it could well be, but it’s hard to miss the affirmation of one possible role of poetry. The passage quoted earlier about T.S. Eliot, David Jones and George Oppen continues. “I differ in emphasising its nature as an emotional process. I have finally come to recognize that I am primarily a lyric poem and a love poet.”

Love is a dangerously imprecise word. I’d suggest that for Hooker, ‘love’ is not just the confusion that drives adolescents to attempt poetry but a mature working through of Buber’s ideas about the possibilities of human relationships, and how the self relates to the world in all its variety of people, writings, history and places. ‘Love poetry’ describes an open-ended conversation, grounded in what Keats called “the holiness of the Heart’s affections.”8

Footnotes

[1] Word and Stone (2019) and Preludes (2024). In the last five years Hooker has also published a book of essays, and three books of mixed poetry and prose in a genre he has made his own: The Art of Seeing (2020), The Release (2022), Addiction, a Love story (2024) and Presence and Place (2025). All  of them have been published by Shearsman. To do it justice, With a Stranger’s Eyes, should be considered in the context of this group of later work, reaching back to include 2016’s Ancestral Lines. But that requires more words than an essay offers.  

2 Unless otherwise stated quotations and page numbers refer to With a Stranger’s Eyes.

3 Martin Buber (1878-1965) published Ich und Du in 1923, published in English in 1937 as I and Thou – a meditation on human relationships, and a critique of objectification and over-abstraction.

4 ‘Simplifying’ here is an extravagant understatement.

5 In 1913 an explosion at the pit head killed 439 men and boys. It was the worst mining disaster in British history.

6 ‘But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand/and the sound of a voice that is still’  From Break Break Break.

7 I’ve written about the man at the window in the context of The Release. https://ladygodivaandme.blogspot.com/2022/02/jeremy-hookers-release-part-three-poems.html 

8 John Keats, in a letter to Benjamin Bailey dated 22 November 1817.

 William the Marshal, realising that the French King has no interest in Peace:

'Good Sir, I'd appreciate it if you'd explain one thing: in France it's the custom for traitors to be treated like scum-burnt at the stake or pulled apart by horses! But now they're part of the establishment; they're all lords and masters!'

'That's fair enough,' the king replied. 'It's all a question of business now-and they're like shit-rags; once you've done your business, you chuck them down the privy.'

The History of William the Marshal, translated by Nigel Bryant. 

Not much has changed.

Second thought.

The History has to be one of the most enjoyable and 'readable' of early Thirteenth Century texts, all the more so since its central character was both 'Europe's Greatest Knight' and by the end of his life a major figure in the politics of the period.  Interesting too, given that it's such a good story, full of incidents and drama, and that the man himself is a fascinating conundrum, that no one has ever turned the Marshal's life into a film. Though if it were filmed, they'd probably ruin it, so perhaps it's for the best. 

This review originally appeared in the Brazen Head, July 2025.

Robbie Coburn’s The Foal in the Wire (Lothian, 2025, 121 pages) 

Set in rural Australia The Foal in the Wire is a book length narrative of short, individually titled poems. 

The story is told by Sam, an adolescent boy. One night he finds a foal caught in a barbed-wire fence. He and his neighbour’s daughter, Julia, save the injured animal. As they help it regain its health, they draw closer together. Sam’s parents’ marriage is falling apart; he’s bullied at school, and Julia’s father is an abusive drunk. Some things are resolved: some can’t be. 

Australia has a tradition of narrative poetry that shows how rich and varied the ‘verse novel’ can be. The three best known, Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune, and Alan Wearne’s The Lovemakers, demonstrate different ways a writer could approach ‘narrative verse’. They are all book-length stories, their lines don’t go all the way to the right margin, and they are marketed as poetry. Their differences are greater than these similarities. Porter’s narrator, Jill, is the literary granddaughter of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Told as a sequence of short, free verse poems, Porter’s lines and images create a modern, laconic private eye. Fredy Neptune is a masterclass in controlled rhythm, and the story, progressing through tightly controlled eight-line stanzas, reads like a picaresque novel. Wearne’s The Lovemakers, with its huge cast of characters, written in a variety of verse forms, reads like nothing and no one else and at 800 pages is one of the longest verse narratives.

At the same time, staying in Australia, there’s a tradition of verse novels aimed at what is now described as the Young Adult market. Pioneered by writers like Steven Herrick, whose A Place Like This still reads well after thirty years, these books range from Herrick’s teenagers trying to find their place in modern Australia to work as different in both form and content as the dystopian science fiction of Lisa Jacobsen’s The Sunlit Zone.

The Foal in the Wire, aimed at the YA market, sits comfortably in such company. It would make an excellent short story. The question anyone writing narrative poetry is forced to confront, sooner or later, is why not write the story in prose? Part of the answer, as suggested above, is that there is a range of techniques for organising words and creating effects with words which are available to someone writing verse.

Coburn has chosen to make little use of those resources. If organised sound is the essential characteristic of poetry, there’s little poetry in the book.

The Foal in the Wire opens:

As I run down the veranda steps
in the dark

I can still hear them screaming
at each other
inside the house.

he doesn’t love her
and she doesn’t love him
but they stay. 

                                    ‘Foal’

Read aloud, I can’t hear a significant difference if the lines were written out as prose. 

As I run down the veranda steps in the dark, I can still hear them screaming at each other inside the house. he doesn’t love her and she doesn’t love him but they stay.

It is very popular stye of verse. The internet is awash with poets who write declarative sentences chopped into short lines. Some of them have had astonishing commercial success. For anyone brought up on this kind of poetry, and that includes many of the current YA market accessing poetry outside of school, Coburn’s style is going to be immediately familiar and comfortable.

In short poems, the style has very little to commend it. It sounds like a clumsy effort to plunk ‘Three Blind Mice’ on a Stradivarius which has recently been used by a virtuoso to play Bach’s Solo Partitas for violin.

However, as Coburn’s poem in the Brazen Head for Spring 2025 suggest, style here is a choice, a balancing of possible loss and gain, and such a plain style has definite advantages when used to write narrative verse.  

No one speaks in poetry but it’s easy to imagine someone telling this story. If Sam were speaking in iambic pentameter or tightly controlled Spenserian stanzas, littering his story with clever literary allusions, he would not sound like a lost teenager in rural Australia.

The other major advantage is pace. The story moves with the inevitability of a folk tale or a parable. Like a folk tale it can deal with cruelty and loss without romanticising or sensationalising either.  

Like a folk tale there is a characteristic blend of the general and the specific. Small details give the story credibility while there is an absence of details that would identify where and when the story takes place. The Foal in the Wire  is located somewhere in rural Australia, on two properties that run horses. There is little to fix when the story happens. Having moved away, Julia writes a letter and sends it through the post. Although she and Sam take the bus to school, they don’t use computers or phones to communicate.

Balanced against this is a careful use of detail making the story believable :

Sam sneaking out at night:

making sure to stay on the clover

lining the sides of the path

to avoid the potholes and depressions

left in the ground by horses.

                                                      (‘Furtive’)

tells us he’s done this many times. Both children, having watched their fathers, know how to help the foal. 

Julia has bought another bottle of formula

and I have a bundle of hay

I gathered

from inside the shed.

dad won’t notice.

whenever hay is lifted

stalks fall from the bale

and gather on the floor. 

                                    ‘Waiting’

Style allows the story to become its own metaphor. The foal is both a particular foal, and a symbol of those who are damaged and survive. None of this needs to be underlined or emphasised. 

It would be a brave writer, especially in a first book, who trusted the reader enough to let the story do all the work. And ‘story’ isn’t everything. The book has a therapeutic potential. It’s offering its readers a realistic message of hope. Coburn occasionally gives those readers a gentle nudge towards the preferred reading as the narrative unfolds but comes close to labouring the point at the end. 

The story ends at ‘After’, which concludes:

I want to write down everything

about my brother and Julia and the foal

I am no longer ashamed of who I am

and where I come from.

I can hold on and be anyone.

Two poems follow and both make the same point without adding to the story. The last piece, ‘Wounded Animal’ ends: 

Maybe this 

scarred and haunted body 

is enough--

the wounded animal

is capable of survival. 

If this seems to be restating what was already obvious, it is in keeping with the narrator’s character in a book aimed at adolescent readers and dedicated ‘for those who are wounded and surviving’. 

There is a contemporary tendency to read poetry through the life of the writer. To claim that the writing is ‘authentic’, ‘raw’ or ‘based on experience’, can set up a defence which  frames any criticism as cruel, irrelevant or a personal attack on the writer.

But as made art, published and offered to strangers, what should matter is the quality of the product. No matter how intense the experience, or the emotion it engenders, once it’s written down and offered to a stranger, it is an unpleasant fact that even trauma is a cliché of life and literature. The more literate the reader, the greater the chance they’ve read versions of this story before. As humans we sympathise with people who suffer, but readers deserve something more for their money than a stranger telling them how bad their life was. 

In the wrong hands The Foal in the Wire would be a string of YA Fiction cliches: a family disintegrating after the death of a child, a narrator lost, isolated, contemplating suicide, bullied at school; first love; first sexual experience; a drunk abusive father; some form of reconciliation. 

What is therefore most impressive about Coburn’s handling of his material is that at no stage does his book read like a string of clichés. ‘First Time’ is that rare piece of writing, a description of a first sexual encounter that doesn’t sound coy, crude or clinical. It manages to capture the baffling nature of the experience:

like holding a body

and cradling a ghost

at the same time. 

Bunting’s injunction: ‘Emotions first- but only facts in the poem’ might be too austere for a modern audience, but Coburn’s book comes close. There is no self-pity, no attempts to exaggerate the horror of the situation and no unrealistic Hollywood ending in which everything is made good and Sam and Julia live happily ever after, running their  own shelter for abused horses.  

Whether or not the story is based on lived experience, Coburn’s triumph is to make it believable.

 The list of book length narratives could be extended, but these five examples give some idea of their variety. Verse novel is no more a genre than prose novel. 

 This review was written with an uncorrected proof copy so quotations may vary in the final, published version. In the version I used sentences within poems consistently begin without a capital letter.

 Why readers buy books containing poems they themselves could have written while they were still at high school is one of life’s mysteries. 

 This is not to suggest that there are no literary teenagers in rural Australia. One of the criticisms levelled against Fredy Neptune was that its central character was too eloquent. 

 There are possible reasons for a lack of phones and computers but their absence adds to the effect.

 Although it seems I’m in the minority, ‘raw’, when applied to writing, is not a compliment. It suggests a lazy chef slapping uncooked food on the diners’ plates and leaving them to do his or her job. 

 The other version of this is to dismiss the writing without reading it because ‘everyone knows’ the writer is guilty of unacceptable behaviour, beliefs or opinions. Both popular extremes tend to ignore the actual writing.

(A Wish)

There will be peace and an end to traveling,

the colour of ocean under a polar sky,

solid as mountains, to bear the brunt

of storms that can no longer trouble

the sleeper in the wind-raked earth.

Time will be glacial, patient as icebergs 

where no rumours whisper, no duty calls,

the strong heartbeat of spring and its flowers:

the tides’ turn, the snow’s fall.

This poem ends Rough Spun to Close Weave which is still available on line. Further samples and signed copies from www.Liamguilar.com. 

The Haunting of Borley rectory. The story of a ghost story by Sean O'Connor.

In my tattered, because old and much read, ‘Folklore Myths and Legends of Britian’ (Reader's Digest 1973) , Borley rectory has its own substantial entry under the title: ‘The most Haunted house in England’. With a half page picture of the building ablaze, and a small reproduction of the ‘Ghostly writings’ that appeared on the walls, the entry relates the ghostly goings on and after a description of the fire at the Rectory, and the burial of some bones found there, ends ‘the nun is still occasionally glimpsed near the site of the rectory and Borley churchyard’. 

Sean O’Connor’s book tells the story of this story, which is far more interesting than that entry suggests. Because he doesn’t just relate the odd goings on at the rectory but traces the lives of those involved, he offers a perhaps unintentional insight into just how difficult it is for anyone to establish ‘the truth’, either in retrospect while writing a book, or while living through the events the book describes.

Borley rectory achieved its notoriety in the years between the First and Second World Wars. As O’Connor notes, in England at the time, most old houses had their ghosts. The 19th century is the great age of the literary ghost story and Borley had a dead nun and a ghostly carriage. When the rector, Eric Smith and his wife called in Harry Price in 1929, ‘poltergeist’ activity suddenly became violent. The story became sensational news, and the rectory almost immediately became a target for sightseers. 

As this book proves, what made Borley famous was not so much its ghostly occupants but a strange tangle of intriguing characters, who might have had different reasons for publicising or even faking the hauntings; local tensions; underlying racism and conservatism; complicated tangles of professional jealousy, and showmanship bordering on fraud.

O'Conner deftly contextualises the story, implying that whatever happened at the Rectory, this story gained the attention it did, because of when it happened.

While O'Connor leads the reader through the story, something has gone missing. It's the story of a story. But was Harry Price, Ghost Hunter, a fraud?  Or was his reputation tarnished by those who resented his success? Were successive rectors and their wives manipulating local stories for their own ends? Were the locals playing tricks on the rectors to get rid of them. Was there ever a nun, let alone her ghost? 

By the time the book reached the 'Afterword' I expected O'Connor to offer his opinion. He’s raised all these issues. Instead, he tries to be impartial and even handed. A little this, a little that, possibly some of the other.  

This is probably inevitable, but it is ironic.  

As O’Connor’s narrative details, the end of the 19th century saw a rise in 'spiritualism' in Britain. During and after the mass slaughter of the ‘Great War’, interest in Spiritual Mediums seemed almost inevitable. At the same time, between the wars, there was a growing attempt to put ‘psychical research’ on to a scientific footing. Humans had believed in an afterlife for centuries. If the reality of ghosts and poltergeists could be scientifically proven, then they were indisputable proof that there was some kind of existence after the body had died.

As O'Connor makes clear, Borley rectory was a test case for ‘the scientific method’. Price had made a name for himself ‘debunking’ fake mediums. If the hauntings at Borley could be documented and analysed; if human fraud could be ruled out; if Facts could be established, then the findings would be beyond dispute.

However, for the scientific method to work, the question ‘Do Ghosts Exist’ must be a binary proposition. As O’Connor’s narrative amply demonstrates, it could never be.

If you wanted practical examples of the idea that  the observer affects the observation, or knowing about the observer undermines the observation, this book is full of them. O’Connor’s biographical approach casts doubt on the reliability and objectivity of almost everyone in the book.  

The chapter devoted to details of Marianne Foyster's life after she left Borley, doesn't add anything. She was the wife of the second Rector in the story, and their relationship was strange by anyone's standard. Price initially thought she was guilty of faking the phenomena. She insisted she wasn't. Knowing how many men she had sex with or how many children she adopted and passed off as her own to snare lovers and husbands, doesn’t prove either right. Her story is strange, it undermines her credibility as a witness, just as Price’s biography undermines his, but it doesn’t solve the argument either way.  

Price, the man who did more than anything to make Borley famous was accused of faking some of the ‘Poltergeist’ activity. His biography, as presented here, details his desire for applause and recognition, and an early attempt at fame based on forgery. By the time his story arrives at the rectory, he has been portrayed as an unreliable attention seeker.  He was guilty of fudging details to make his books more interesting. He made claims he knew to be false. His scientific methods simply were not very ‘scientific'. Where there were rational, mundane explanations for almost everything he ignored these in his published work. But does any of that mean there were no unexplained phenomena at Borley?

In a fictional ghost story the unreliable characters or the unreliable narrator might undermine the credibility of the narrative. But the effect, in real life, is less clear cut. Does someone with a history of lying never tell the truth? 

So was Borley rectory haunted? If you want an answer to that question, then this book will not provide it. It can’t. It will tell you who thought it was, and who doubted. It does tell a fascinating story about the characters involved and demonstrates how untidy, inconsistent, and irrational people are.   With their own ambitions, needs and desires, ranging here from the mundane to the extra ordinary, they can’t be reduced to the simplicities of fiction that would bring the story to a satisfying close.