A LENGTH OF ROAD
In 1841 the ‘peasant poet’ John Clare escaped from an asylum in Epping Forest, where he had been kept for four years, and walked over eighty miles home to Northamptonshire. In 1995, with his life in crisis, Robert decided to retrace Clare’s route along the Great North Road over a punishing four day walk. A Length of Road is a profound and poetic exploration of class, gender, grief and sexuality through the author’s own experiences and the autobiographical writing of John Clare.
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Blue Wallpaper (2019)
SHORTLISTED for the 2020 POLARI PRIZE for excellence in LGBTQ+ literature
Through the six sections of Blue Wallpaper – his fourth collection – Robert Hamberger explores family and friendship, the limits of masculinity, variations on Rimbaud sonnets, animal encounters, developing a queer identity and moving to the sea. His voice is intimate, questing and questioning, using the prism of personal experience to search themes of memory, home, ageing and love.
Blue Wallpaper contains ‘Unpacking the books’, highly commended in the 2019 Forward Prize.
Leaving the Party Early
My dead friend said Why not leave
the party early? So, on the stroke
of midnight, before I become a pumpkin
or mouse, without dropping a glass
slipper, I abandon the songs I barely know,
and hear – through open windows higher
than myself – Dancing Queen, where
I’d been a dancing queen ten minutes
ago. The freedom of walking away,
dodging the cars when lights are green.
I eat a kebab, me – a vegetarian
for thirty years – with no-one telling me
not to, thinking I’ll dance for as long
as I choose, and never leave.
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“If there is a finer sonneteer writing today, I’m yet to read them...It’s high time that Hamberger becomes widely acknowledged as the marvellous poet he is.”
“Tender, humane and sensual poems which look with frankness at the body in ecstasy, the body in decline, the young body, and the middle-aged body, finding there a real beauty and the possibility of transcendence.”
“Robert Hamberger’s signature is the sonnet and the love poem. Love courses through this collection, in poems about the death of his mother, a childhood friend, a colleague. Perhaps it’s these deaths that make Blue Wallpaper so tenderly grateful for every day – watching his husband sleep, remembering an eccentric aunt, watching a pig by a fence. These are poems as vivid and surprising as the lives they celebrate.”
“Blue Wallpaper sees Robert Hamberger at his enviable best. He’s a poet who shapes language so it sings with resonant clarity. These are fiercely truthful poems where experience is transformed by an expert handling of rhyme, metre and the sonnet form as well as a wonderful sensitivity to the impact of lucid, economical phrasing. ”
Torso
In Torso, his third collection, Robert Hamberger continues to explore the boundaries of skin as son, father, lover and poet. Torso includes three major new sequences, including a celebrated version of Lorca’s dark love sonnets, elegies for a friend and a queer reclaiming of sacred texts.
The Ark Inside
I guzzle a hundred hosannas,
swallowing pearls
meeting everyone in me
at the stripped page:
every orchid, hailstone and dragon,
every crocodile, every swan.
For original copies of ‘Torso’ please use Contact author link on this website
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“‘Hamberger has two wonderful gifts. He can do loss so that you feel the breakdown into error and powerlessness, but he can still find the affirming flame among the negation and despair. On the other hand, when he celebrates he does so in full knowledge of human vulnerability.”
“‘Robert Hamberger’s poems are gritty and compelling; he often uses the sonnet form to startlingly good effect – not an easy task, but he achieves real emotional resonance.’”
The Smug Bridegroom
The Smug Bridegroom traces the shifts in family life and relationships, the break-up of marriage and renewal of hope, which is itself endangered by heart surgery. Robert Hamberger explores the certainties and doubts of fatherhood, love and change.
Before
One week before your operation
you've become glass to me:
a delicate vessel holding all you might be
between unsteady hands. This motion
of crossing a room could tip your libation.
I wait in the kitchen, not wanting to miss any
drop of you walking towards me. I see
pyjamas in a half-packed suitcase open
upstairs. I'm a father letting you go
for a ride with stranger, out of my sight.
Treat him well, I want to say. You don't know
his gifts: how memorable the light
has become since he stood by this window;
his breath stroking my spine in bed last night.
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“This is a collection of first person poems, all of which reveal a sensitive, intelligent voice. The middle section of the book deals with the break up of a marriage and achieves a succinctness and precision I’ve seldom encountered elsewhere. The Smug Bridegroom brims with quality: it is lucid, economical, outstanding. By far the best poetry collection of 2002.”
“The book is a journey through the hinterland of marriage, separation, new relationships, and heart surgery... the scale of each of these different areas seem sharply and accurately drawn together with memorable use of images... elegant and forthright cameos. The poet cares about our response, and with this comes a sense of fellow humanity.”
“In poems of great subtlety and technical finesse, and without unneeded ostentation or concealment, Hamberger gives as clear an insight into love’s routines and surprises as I have recently seen in any British poetry.”
The Rule of Earth
The Rule of Earth is a winner in The Poetry Business Competition 2000
The Rule of Earth is a sequence of twenty one love sonnets, charting the daily routines and ecstasy of a gay relationship that’s suddenly placed at risk by heart disease.
Tunnel of Leaves
Driving to meet the children by the sea
we enter a tunnel of leaves. Sunlight
dabbles the windscreen, our sight
dazed, squinted, assuming we can see
the same dazzle. Striped by shadows, you beside me,
becoming the music we’re hearing: this flight
of wings a waterfall, green over white
on our upturned faces. We barely
remember where we’re heading. Only
that we’re driving to meet them, speeding
through minutes, trees or tarmac, nearly
forgetting which: asking the wrong thing
if we want this to stand still, its beauty
being always in the moving.
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“‘Hamberger’s poems have a direct and sincere lyric simplicity, standing in the centre of the room sensing the space around them in quiet, unassuming gentleness.”
“‘The Rule of Earth is a collection of exquisite sonnets about a gay relationship that moved me to tears. To be honest, I’ve often seen the sonnet as a kind of straitjacket in the wrong hands, but Hamberger makes them fly.’”
“‘Robert Hamberger writes in a deceptively simple manner. A must for poetry readers and a perfect introduction for the curious.”
Warpaint Angel
Robert Hamberger's first collection of poems is available from Five Leaves, since its original publisher, Blackwater Press, departed for that great poetry library in the sky. Warpaint Angel explores fatherhood and sonhood, the meaning of family and friendship, the nature of love. It includes a significant sequence charting the last illness of a friend with AIDS.
The Garden
After he died I cut down the trees.
I wanted as much light as I could get.
Stumps no fire could ash. The flesh of split
wood like clotted cream. I was up to my knees
in branches, finishing them off. In the breeze
made by all this space I wanted it
back the way it was. Dandelion clocks. Nettles. Thick wet
grass, and those over-ripe blackberries
squashed at the slightest touch. That garden's gone.
We'll rotavate, level and turf it. We'll
grow another garden where the kids can run
naked, like Eden before death. A year's over. I'm
still learning he's gone. Silence. Here's my breath. Listen.
Kids are laughing while this year's apples fall.
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“These are poems of toughness, delicacy and great dignity. They open up effectively from the private to something which can move the reader who is right outside the situation. Robert Hamberger trusts colloquial diction to carry a weight of emotion, and it does.”
“Robert Hamberger’s poems manage to occupy a space between too easy transcendence and unbearable harshness. The brave poems of fatherhood and sonhood break new ground. With its mixture of compellingly straightforward narratives and haunted dreamlike lyrics and its sure but relaxed sense of formal control, Warpaint Angel is an unusually satisfying and trustworthy first collection.”
