The Dark Trilogy

Description

At the heart of the book is a poem, the poet’s life and, perhaps most importantly, a romance. The fictional autobiography which makes up the longest book of The Trilogy is written by a close friend of the poet, a scholar asked to interpret a poem for its readers, and holds the two histories of this one man – the author’s literary alter ego – displaced by several hundred years: histories which interweave and come together in the Welsh mountains in the present day.

And a part of one of those lives is traced further in the play for voices which makes up the second volume. Book three brings our characters to a resolution of kinds.

Chris Armstrong has blended fact and fiction to create a complex story with many strands… a story of the sea, a story of passionate love, a story about a poet, a story about the poet’s friend and editor, and a story about the past: a past that the  writer only understands completely at the very end of his anabasis – his journey away from the sea.