Liam Guilar
Liam Guilar grew up in Coventry, studied
Medieval Literature and History at Birmingham University,
and then did an MA at the University of Queensland.
He can claim to be one of the few lute playing kayaking
medievalists to have been given twenty four hours to
leave Samarkand. Dancing with the Bear, the story of
that journey, is online at www.isu.edu/outdoor/dwbstart.htm.
He currently lives in Australia. His most recent collection
of poems, I’ll Howl Before You
Bury Me, is also
available as a CD-Rom with audio files combining voice,
music and digital manipulation http://cdbaby.com/cd/guilar.
The three poems published here are from ‘Lady Godiva
and Me’, a sequence which will be published in December
2008 by Nine Arches Press.
Godiva and Me
A mythic landscape talked about in whispers.
The convent girls who giggle on the bus.
Lust, like a slide rule, something you'd encounter
and have explained to you in high school.
Like singing in a foreign language. The obscene
jokes and gestures that you never understood. Words
scrawled on toilet walls. That nameless place
where neck and shoulder meet, the way
a sudden movement turned the world to water.
Lady Godiva's statue in the rain, patiently
teaching anatomy to boys
before nudity was common on TV.
Vertigo
These words worked the long day Harold died,
when Norman French swept up the slope of Senlac hill
and English grammar broke and bled into the dusk.
Harold rotted in his unmarked grave,
but the tattered remnants of his word hoard
colonized the globe. Linguistic vertigo:
peer into the word, encounter gravity in meaning,
fall and find yourself, there in the shield-wall
beating battle axe on war-board, chanting
"Out! Out! Out!" as the chain-mailed tide,
grey as the Channel, flows up the hill.
Godgifu
I will make public what you label private.
Flesh in the wind-blown spaces.
I cannot ride outside your language
but I can step beyond your shadow,
dissolve the plural pronoun,
disrupt affection's feudal hierarchy.
Can you love the one who rides away,
or who returns, before dismounting
to regain a name, a title and some clothes?
© 2008
Salt Publishing Limited 
