A Man of Heart

A Man of Heart, the second part of A Presentment of Englishry, is the story of Vortigern and the end of Roman Britain. It is also a story about story-telling. It continues to follow the narrative trajectory of Laȝamon's late 12th-century version of The Legendary History, the foundation myth of Britain. By the 12th century this had very little in common with 'History' as we understand it in the 21st. Attempts to resolve the discrepancies or reconcile Laȝamon's version with what we currently know about the period are futile. Nor is it possible to rationalize the chronology. There are anachronisms, contradictions and inconsistencies in my text. It is not a modern novel. -Liam GuilarThe deconstructionist view of there being no single attainable truth about the past is worth bearing in mind as we become immersed in Liam Guilar's moving reconstruction of the land called Britain in the long-gone world of the 11th and 12th centuries: there are merely the histories which people tell to empower themselves in the present. This is of course applicable both to history and to memory since everything we see is filtered through our present-day mental lenses and we interpret the past in the light of what we have now become.[...] Liam Guilar's reconstruction of the foundations of our past is a con-vincing sift of details that offers the reader a 'morning familiar as cold stone' with 'Rain drifting through the smoke hole in the roof'. -Ian Brinton, Long Poem Magazine