(David McCooey, Australian poet and critic, on The Fabled Third and its predecessors. (Email correspondence, published here with his kind permission.)

‘I love the sense of mood in all of your work. I love, too, your skill with, and attention to, the sonic condition of poetry (not something often talked about these days). Like this:

A dappled grey horse, huge,
its rider dressed for the hunt,
in fawn-coloured clothes,
horn slung around his neck,
watching him from the trees.
A bent note in the rustle of the forest.

What superb vowel music. And then there is, of course, your historical imagination. I love moments like the footnote on ‘gebedda’. Your skill with narrative and image is often, to use a hackneyed term, cinematic. (I’m thinking especially of when you start and end a scene.) And lastly, though not finally, as a work of intertextuality, I am in awe of the knowledge and adaptation skills evident in your trilogy.

Congratulations on the trilogy; it’s an extraordinary achievement.’

( David’s most recent collection The Book of Falling, is published by Upswell Poetry. He is also Professor of literature and writing at Deakin University.)

The English poet and critic Jeremy Hooker on The Fabled Third. (Email correspondence reproduced here with his kind permission.)

The Fabled Third' is a rare, magnificent achievement both alone and in relation to the sequence. The only problem I have with reading it is that I can't always tell who is speaking - which makes me wish for more information at the front or back of the book. Yet the absence of this may also be seen as a virtue. For you, the invisible author, are completely inside the narrative and the actions and characters. The stories are driven, and the many short, verbless sentences compel them forward. This, though, is only one technique, in a work in which style, matter and pre-modern attitudes create a world. You are, as I have said, invisible, only present in occasional footnotes and quotations that reveal the depth of scholarship on which the work is based. But you are of course the poet, the master of language, responsible for the clean drive of the prose narrative and the more poetic or aphoristic passages, such as 'small birds alighting on a tree/after a storm has rinsed the air bright.', or 'Nostalgia is a perverse mistress./ Memory's destructive sister, ...' Evocations of atmospheric landscapes (eg., p. 122) and of rich clothing and weapons (e.g., pp. 146 - 148) enhance the narrative. Many passages are memorable. For example: 'What do you think life means, storyteller?' and the preceding and following lines, and 'We are not rivers, trees, or rocks./We are the animal that narrates,/ ... free to reimagine.'

My congratulations. I do not know of any other poetic work as substantial, ambitious or memorable as this written in our time.

The Fabled Third is available from Shearsman books in the UK, most online book sellers and from the shop on this website (www.liamguilar.com) where you can also find samples and further information.