The Horseman's Word
  • Published: 21 April 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446476253
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384

The Horseman's Word

Formats & editions
EBook
21 Apr 2011
Paperback
15 Nov 2012
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A wonderfully written memoir by an acclaimed poet.

In a memoir as vivid and unpredictable as any novel we follow Roger Garfitt on his journey from stable boy to jazz dancer, from Oxford dandy to Sixties drop-out. We see him on horseback with the Riding Master to the Kings of Portugal and in a beatnik pad with Redmond O'Hanlon. We watch as he is introduced to David Bowie and realises that the wrong one has come as the rock star. We follow him back to the Norfolk village where as a small child he had glimpsed the world through his grandfather's eyes and we are inside his head as he gradually cuts loose from the real world, eventually being committed to a locked ward in a mental hospital.

Written with a poet's gift for language, The Horseman's Word is an account of what it is like to feel the world too acutely, to love too obsessively, to go right to the very edge and, miraculously, survive.
  • Published: 21 April 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446476253
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384
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About the author

Roger Garfitt

A freelance writer ever since he won the Gregory Award in 1974, Roger Garfitt has been Poetry Critic of London Magazine, Editor of Poetry Review, Writing Fellow at UEA and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Swansea University. He runs Poetry Masterclasses for the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education at Madingley Hall. He was married to Frances Horovitz, whose Collected Poems he edited after her early death from cancer. He made another life in Colombia, reporting for Granta and London Review of Books. Now remarried and living in Shropshire, he performs Poetry and Jazz with the John Williams Septet and jazz composer Nikki Iles, and Poetry & Dulcimer Music with Sue Harris on the hammered dulcimer. His Selected Poems, which includes extracts from his journals, is published by Carcanet Press.

Praise for The Horseman's Word

He's produced a memoir that deserves to put him on the wider literary map... Garfitt writes beautifully

James Walton, Daily Mail

Garfitt's eye for the telling details of character...evidence great skill and fine judgment, but it is when he recounts his descent into madness, that the full range of his narrative gifts emerges... Garfitt relates it so vividly that the reader enters into the madman's mind and sees the world from his point of view... A superb achievement

John Burnside, Guardian

His gentle, coaxing tour across the fervid climbs, lonely sloughs and frustrating plateaus of his early English years has a poetic delicacy of expression... Deeply affecting...The Horseman's Word is a searing act of personal confession

Independent

A pungently beautiful piece of writing... This is no nostalgia piece: Garfitt's rich, vivid reminiscences are alive to the hardship and petty injustices of the times and inextricably entwined with his own ponderous, impassioned attempts to discover and assert his own personality

Metro