Told by Firelight in Timbered Halls by Adam Bolivar
Jackanapes Press (September 2025)
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
Adam Bolivar is the author of The Lay of Old Hex (Hippocampus Press, 2017), The Ettinfell of Beacon Hill (Jackanapes Press, 2021), Ballads for the Witching Hour (Hippocampus Press 2022), and A Wheel of Ravens (Jackanapes Press, 2023). A marionette-maker as well, he has written a multitude of original puppet-plays which have been performed in a wide variety of peculiar venues. A native of gambrel-roofed Boston, Massachusetts, he currently resides in the gloomy dreamlands of Portland, Oregon with his golden-haired wife and son. His newest collection is Told by Firelight in Timbered Halls.
Told by Firelight in Timbered Halls is Bolivar’s second collection of poems written using Old English Verse Lines. Old English Verse Lines have an underlying four pulse meter with heavy alliteration. As the cover reads, “Although the grammar of Modern English differs greatly from the terse inflections of Old English, Bolivar has set himself the task of proving that the strictures of traditional alliterative verse can be adapted to contemporary language, a feat he accomplishes with determination and verve.”
Indeed, Bolivar is able to accomplish much with Old English Verse Lines. The poems themselves are tightly crafted, and Bolivar’s rhythms and craft are as tight as ever. For example, from “The Black Shepherd”:
The Black Shepherd bides in darkness,
Shimmering his lantern, shining wanly,
Making mischief on a moonless night
For reckless fools enraptured by the spark,
And follow it far into the fearful moor,
Ghostlight guided.
or these tight opening lines from the Winter-horror poem “The Yulefather,”
At yearsend rides the Yulefather,
His horse eightlegged, hatbrim ample,
Laughing merrily through the long darkness,
On mead drunken.
This is exactly the sort of thing one can expect from Adam Bolivar’s Told by Firelight in Timbered Halls; compact lines with heavy alliteration retelling folktales and stories through an Old English lens. As Bolivar writes in the introduction, “Reconstructing Anglo-Saxon paganism is a hobbyhorse of mine,” so many of these poems use the Old English or Old Norse names for deities and are focused in that historic world and world view. In a sense, rather than write contemporary horror poems using Old English Verse Meter, Bolivar might be said to have retold more contemporary folktales back into imagined earlier versions, versions based on cold and ice, fire and darkness.
As such, readers unfamiliar with this world might stumble a bit. Bolivar grabs his readers immediately with the opening poem “Géac Yoresung” (pronounced “YAWK YORE-sung”) and plunges them into this world of Old English words and worldview. This might be disconcerting, and while Bolivar provides ample explanations, as well as thorough introductory essay at the end of the collection, the language might be a bit too much at the offset for readers expecting a more contemporary idiom.
Adam Bolivar’s Told by Firelight in Timbered Halls is exactly what it says it is, a collection of myths and folktales reimagined by a contemporary poet into an Old English world. The stories are versions of folktales and trickster stories, as one would expect from Bolivar, but the language and the presentation is much older. These poems read as though they are being told by an Eddic bard around a fire while the winds whip and the storms rage outside. Readers interested in formal poetry will thoroughly enjoy this, but fans of horror poetry in general will want this book on their shelves.
