Book description
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.
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.
