Robert Hamberger on John Clare's poem 'The Field Mouse's Nest' and his own poem 'Herb Robert'

The Two-Way Poetry Podcast

In this episode, I talk to Robert Hamberger about John Clare’s poem 'The Field Mouse’s Nest' and his own poem 'Herb Robert'.

In our conversation, Robert talks about how his art teacher introduced to him to the works of Sylvia Plath and John Clare (among others). He discusses the 'everyday' language he uses in his poetry and how (through this 'political act') he doesn’t want to exclude his readers. He goes on to explore the idea of the sonnet - how can you find your voice inside the given ‘rules’ of the fourteen-line poem - the rhyme scheme, the weight of tradition: ‘a lovely challenge’. Robert then elaborates on Clare’s background - his prodigious output of poetry (even when he was incarcerated) and from this reflects on how important it is to separate writing from publishing (to see them as two separate activities). Robert then discusses 'The Field Mouse's Nest'. He explores punctuated and unpunctuated versions of this sonnet, and Clare's use of dialect, reading from Seamus Heaney's essay ‘John Clare’s Prog’. He touches on the idea of Clare as an ecopoet.

He then goes on to illuminate the evolution of his memoir A Length of Road: Finding Myself in the Footsteps of John Clare from 1995 onward - and how the poem 'Herb Robert' fits into the larger scheme of the book. He talks about 'Herb Robert' as a queer poem, and from this insight, shows how the relationship between himself and Clare - and his understanding of himself developed as he drafted and redrafted the work. He then goes on to talk at length about the hold the sonnet has had on him over his writing life, and how this poem, in particular, fitted in as one of his 'form-testing' poems.

You can read John Clare's Northborough Sonnets (mentioned in the podcast) in this edition from Carcanet Press. Seamus Heaney's essay on John Clare comes from his collection of essays The Redress of Poetry (Faber, 2002). Here is a version of 'The Field Mouse's Nest' from the Poetry Archive (with 'cesspools' instead of 'sexpools' in the final line).

Robert Hamberger has been shortlisted and highly commended for Forward prizes, appearing in the Forward Book of Poetry 2020. He won The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2023 and has been awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship. His poetry has featured as the Guardian Poem of the Week and in British, American, Irish and Japanese anthologies. He has published six poetry pamphlets and four full-length collections. Blue Wallpaper (Waterloo Press) was shortlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize. His prose memoir with poems A Length of Road: finding myself in the footsteps of John Clare was published by John Murray in 2021. His fifth collection Nude Against A Rock from Waterloo Press was published in October 2024.

You can find Robert Hamberger's website here.

You can follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

Herb Robert

What flavour of man is this, whose tips
unpeel into flowers? His arrows blossom.
Five petals top each blood-line that dips
and lifts through the breeze. I've seen him
hide by the creaky bridge where lattice-water
dabbles a trout's tail while bubbles rise.
His leaves mimic ferns, his colour
campion. How can he be less than he is?
He lives his name. Two bulbs branch from every stem,
until I catch him taking over
the wood-side. A hundred buds swarm
their messages on the air.
If I eat his breath will it heal me?
Stroke him across my temples quietly, quietly.