A Length of Road: Finding Myself in the Footsteps of John Clare: A John Murray Original - Softcover

Hamberger, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 147369793X ISBN 13: 9781473697935

Publisher: JM Originals, 2021

Synopsis

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. Suffering from poor mental health, Clare was attempting to return to his idealized first love, Mary, unaware that she had died three years earlier.

In 1995, with his life in crisis and his own mental health fragile, Robert decides to retrace Clare's route along the Great North Road over a punishing four-day walk. As he walks he reflects on the changing landscape and on the evolving shape of his own family, on fatherhood and masculinity, and on the meaning of home.

Part memoir, part travel-writing, part literary criticism, A Length of Road is a deeply profound and poetic exploration of class, gender, grief and sexuality through the author's own experiences and through the autobiographical writing of poet John Clare.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Hamberger is a published poet of six pamphlets and three collections, who works have been broadcast on Radio 4 and published in the Observer, New Statesman, The Spectator, Poetry Review and Gay Times. This is his first non-fiction book.

Edition details

• Publisher: JM Originals
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 147369793X
• ISBN 13: 9781473697935
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336