Poetry & Prose

Robert hamberger

PUBLISHED In 2021 - A LENGTH OF ROAD - available in Paperback, Kindle and AUDiobook

‘My history’s unreeling with the road’

Six weeks after Robert and his wife separated, he retraced John Clare’s 1841 walk of eighty-five miles from an asylum in Epping Forest along the Great North Road to Clare’s home near Peterborough.

Like Clare, Robert sleeps rough for three nights and takes four days to complete his walk. Robert’s head is full of questions about his own life, Clare’s writing, changes in the landscape, the meaning of love, home, family, friendship, sexuality.

‘A Length of Road’ follows Robert’s retracing of what Iain Sinclair has called ‘one of the great English journeys’. It’s a genre fluid book, a compelling mixture of memoir, travel writing, nature writing, literary criticism and poetry.  

 ‘a transformational experience…Robert’s account of his journey - part travelogue, part confessional - is profoundly moving,’ (Choice magazine, July 2021)

‘Hamberger’s need to ‘do’ Clare’s journey is personal. At a crossroads, he understands the only way to effectively process his sense of grief over a friend’s death and his marital breakdown is this secular-ascetic journey…What is contained in Hamberger’s account…is a powerful intersubjective statement of how we map ourselves onto existing literary figures…In many of these passages, one is demonstrably moved. Clare’s own mental health traumas, many of which he will have repressed, are made real by Hamberger, who sees affecting parallels in the negotiating of raising children after divorce…the beauty of Hamberger’s account is unquestionable…As a poet, Hamberger ventures into prosodic analysis, and makes many interesting insights into poems of Clare that remain ill-studied…The work’s strength is also this driftingness, however, leading one into a multi-genre panorama of memoir, literary analysis, and poetry…Hamberger and Clare poetically commingle, and reflect evocatively on the reality of this journey as metonym for any journey.’ (Sam Hickford, John Clare Society Journal, 2023)

‘Part travelogue, part psychic geography, part memoir, part critical reading, part poetry collection…Hamberger describes following on foot the route of Clare’s famous walk from the asylum he had escaped from, in Epping Forest, some eighty miles northward to his home in Northamptonshire. His account of trudging along busy highways (and accepting a couple of brief lifts) and sleeping rough, is interleafed with Clare’s account of his own journey, the pace of which he tries to keep up with, blisters and all. Each poet is alone in his own anguish - Hamberger and his wife having just separated, he missing his young children and at the same time pondering his own (what?) emergent gayness - but also apt to strike up conversations with strangers both kind and hostile. Hamberger reads Clare’s poems along the way, and writes his own, in response to both the poems and the man. He looks out for signs, among the traffic and the litter and the bleak edifices of modern commerce, that the natural world Clare wrote about is still available for him too to write about. Of course, laying out his own poetry alongside Clare’s is a pretty audacious thing to do, but this is not a competition and Hamberger engages in it with all due humility and deference. He is equal to the task.’ (Gregory Woods, 2023)

‘The power of this observational narrative successfully placed me at one of Robert Hamberger’s shoulders, as much as John Clare was on his opposite shoulder…Throughout the foot-blistering and emotionally taxing odyssey, the beauty of Hamberger’s descriptive attention to the four days balanced with his frank self-observation, and a complementary appreciation of John Clare’s history…The manner in which Hamberger undertook and surmounted a task of such confrontation, with determination and resilience, is an inspiration…And with John Clare as his spiritual guide, Robert Hamberger could ask for no better travelling companion.’ (Simon Smalley - Amazon, 2024)

‘In 1841 the ‘peasant poet’ John Clare escapes from an asylum in Epping Forest, after an incarceration lasting four years, walks about 80 miles to his home in Northamptonshire, convinced he is to meet his first love Mary Joyce…Clare left a stunning and vivid account of that 80-mile walk in his autobiographical writings…In his book Robert Hamberger leaves just as vivid a portrait of following much the same route in the 1990s…Robert’s account of that journey is a fascinating account of just what has changed in those years…Robert Hamberger captures so well the constant roar of the traffic, the consequences of urban sprawl, the commercial trash that disfigures the travelling routes of this country…Yet, despite all of that, he finds traces of the older rural landscape that John Clare would have known…I finished reading this book and immediately sat down to read it again. Robert Hamberger is a poet and it shows on every page of this account - he writes like an angel! I found myself never wanting to put the book down, so much did I lose myself in its pages. A Length of Road is one of those rare books that will stay in your mind long after you finish reading it. Highly recommended. ‘ (John Bainbridge, Countryways blog on Wordpress.com, June 2024)

Some quotations from Amazon reviews:

‘an excellent read…Excerpts from the writings of Clare add much to the book, as do the author’s own poems…I was drawn to this book because of my great appreciation of the works of John Clare, and I have found an excellent writer in Hamberger’ (Podiceps cristatus)

‘This book is such an innovative, informative and well-crafted memoir…Hamberger weaves the two narrative threads together (John Clare’s walk and his own long walk re-tracing Clare’s) masterfully throughout.’ (Jason Roush)

‘Unforgettable - books like this don’t come along often enough…The writing is simply beautiful, prose and poetry…And it’s such a brave book too. I haven’t enjoyed or appreciated a book so much for ages.’ (V.R.Gebbie)

‘A moving personal tale of loss and discovery…Hamberger compares and contrasts the two men’s journeys. A thoughtful and moving account of man’s anxiety to do the right thing, to conform to society’s ‘norms’ and yet, ultimately, his need to be true to himself.’ (Lisa Wright)

‘While the journey it describes takes only a few days, the ground it covers is far-reaching…What does it mean to be a working class man? An artist? When ‘boys from council estates don’t pick up a pen’?…A Length of Road is carefully crafted and interspersed with the author’s beautiful poems reimagining aspects of Clare’s life. It will move you.’ (Maria Jastrzebska)

‘This is a wonderful book, whether you choose to read it in book form or listen on audible…Finding the route, literally and metaphorically, makes for an engrossing read. The fine detail, the careful exposition, deepens the understanding which often brought me to tears. Memories are acutely observed and examined in beautiful prose…and at the end of each section there are poems, exquisitely written, in Clare’s voice. Highly recommended.’ (Janet Sutherland)

‘Robert Hamberger successfully weaves together multiple themes…It’s a formidable achievement…The word ‘journey’ is often overused, but this book describes a physical, emotional and life-time journey in a moving and original way.’ (Russell Burton)