Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems (2 page)

Roberts encountered Tambimuttu, Henry Treece, George Barker, Roy Campbell, Kathleen
Raine and others, poets associated with the New Romantic and ‘Apocalypse’ groupings.
She also knew the Anglo-Welsh poets – not just Dylan Thomas, but R.S. Thomas, Glyn
Jones and Vernon Watkins. She was familiar, largely through translation, with
Welsh-language
poetry from the earliest literature to the work of her
contemporaries
, and several of her own poems experiment with the
englyn
, a traditional Welsh strict metre form. Roberts also read, and attended
readings
by, Auden, MacNeice and Day Lewis, and the influence of these poets has been underexplored
– on her conception of the long poem for instance, not to mention her interest in
the moving image, film and sound and mass media. Of the established modernists she
knew and read Eliot and David Jones, as well as the work of poets and critics, like
Laura Riding and Graves, who set themselves against modernism. Her diary, letters
and
autobiography
contain many fine, lapidary or humorous vignettes of the literary world of the time:
Cecil Day Lewis is ‘like a temperate book on a shelf’; MacNeice, ‘bastard-looking:
excellent delivery of sinewy and satirical verse’; R.S. Thomas, ‘a gloomy sort of
person – who like most intelligent ministers today doesn’t believe in the church that
he preaches’. One of
Lynette’s most effusive admirers was Edith Sitwell, with whom she
corresponded
for several years from the early 1940s, and to whom she dedicated
Gods with Stainless Ears
. Lynette’s unpublished account of a tea party with the Sitwells suggests that, despite
her affection for Edith, she was not comfortable in the Sitwellian
milieu
. ‘Yesterday a wretched day of my life’, she begins, elaborating:

In 1943, Roberts began a correspondence with Robert Graves. Their letters contain
a fascinating insight into the composition of
The White Goddess
, to which Roberts contributed material and advice on sources, and for which she is
acknowledged in the foreword to the book. The previous year, in 1942, she had sent
some poems to T.S. Eliot at Faber, and a few months after a manuscript of
A Heroic Poem
, later to become
Gods with Stainless Ears
. Eliot was interested, though found it ‘stiff going’ and suggested she send him a
volume of short poems. He asked for the ‘Heroic Poem’ again in 1948, and it was published
three years later. In the dustjacket notes to
Poems
, Eliot wrote:

The acknowledgements to the book reveal the range of journals she published in: George
Orwell’s politically engaged
Tribune
contrasts with the exotic, aesthetic home of the New Romantic and Apocalypse poets,
Tambimuttu’s
Poetry London
; the urbane
Horizon
of Cyril Connolly contrasts with James Laughlin’s modernist
New Directions
, recently founded to promote Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D. and others.
From the memoirs and letters of the time, Roberts emerges as a kind of insider’s outsider,
well-connected but somehow out on a limb: ‘the one and only Latino-Welsh modernist’,
as one of her best critics, Nigel Wheale, puts it.
11
As a special interest group, a sort of ‘fusion-identity’, this is certainly an unusual
category to fall into.

Life at Llanybri was very different from the London literary scene. Keidrych was often
away, and after going AWOL from the army (
Gods with Stainless Ears
obliquely refers to this in Part II where the gunner is interned and appears before
the army board), he was transferred to the Ministry of
Information for the last three years of the war. One of Lynette’s most painful experiences
came in summer 1942, when the rumour began in the village that she was a spy. This
is the subject of her poem ‘Raw Salt on Eye’:

By 1948, the marriage with Keidrych had broken up. Lynette left Llanybri and moved
temporarily to a caravan in Laugharne, the village that inspired Thomas’s ‘Under Milk
Wood’. Her address, written at the bottom of several of her unpublished poems, was
‘The Caravan, The Graveyard, Laugharne’. The couple divorced in 1949, and she returned
to London, where she lived in Kent Terrace NW1 and in a caravan in Bells Wood, Hertfordshire,
close to where the children went to boarding school. Since
Poems
and
Gods with Stainless Ears
, she had put together another full
collection
, and continued to publish in magazines and journals. The manuscript for
The Fifth Pillar of Song
, containing eighty-odd pages of new poems (and several earlier ones excluded from
Poems
), was sent to Eliot in 1951. It was turned down two years later. Between 1950 and
1952 Lynette continued to give poetry readings (her bibliography lists readings at
the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Oxford University Poetry Society) and took
part in radio programmes on the Welsh Regional Service and the Third Programme. Poems
continued to appear in journals –
Poetry
(Chicago),
Poetry
(London),
The Listener
– until 1953, but by now her career as a poet had effectively ended. In December
1952, a verse play, ‘O Lovers of Death’, was broadcast (neither script nor recording
survives) on the Welsh Regional Service. In February 1953
El Dorado
, a ‘radio ballad’ about Welsh colonists in Patagonia, was broadcast on the Third
Programme and repeated twice. Other projects – anthologies, editions, essays – came
to nothing. In 1954 she published her last book,
The Endeavour
, a novel about Captain Cook’s expedition.

In 1955–6 Roberts set up the Chislehurst Caves art project in Kent, which ended after
an accident in which a cave ceiling collapsed and
seriously
injured the sculptor Peter Danziger. The paintings exhibited on the cave walls were
by the Guyanese artist Denis Williams. In 1956, and partly as a result of the project’s
failure, Roberts had a mental breakdown, and in the same year her sister Win bought
her a house near Chislehurst. It was the first home of her own. Later that year, while
still recovering, Roberts became a Jehovah’s Witness, and remained one for the rest
of her life. In 1970 she returned to Llanybri, moving into a cottage in Spring Gardens.
Suffering from schizophrenia, she was committed four times under the
Mental Health Act to St David’s Hospital, Carmarthen. After her first stay in hospital,
she moved to Carmarthen, and then in 1989 to Towy Haven residential home in Ferryside,
overlooking Llansteffan on the other side of the bay. In December 1994 she fell and
broke her hip while dancing, and later had a heart attack in hospital. She died of
heart failure on 26 September at Towy Haven, and was buried in Llanybri churchyard.

One way into Lynette Roberts’ work is ‘Swansea Raid’. It appeared first in
Life and Letters To-Day
in 1941 (as ‘From a New Perception of Colour’, subtitled ‘And I shall take as my
Example the Raid on Swansea) and was reprinted with some differences in
Village Dialect
:

‘I’ breezily corrects herself from first person pronoun to number, and the tone from
the start is excited rather than fearful. The voices are rendered
in direct speech, speech that is tender and comradely, emphasising how, beneath the
impersonality of numbers, human relations continue intact (direct speech fragments
in Roberts tend to be identity-emphatic, and not – as in much modernist poetry – identity-scrambling).
At the end of ‘Swansea Raid’, the names return, as dust settles after an explosion.
Place, people and things rebecome themselves: ‘Rosie returns to fetch the cows’; ‘I
lonely’ goes back indoors; the fire is no longer the fire of flares and
explosions
but an intimate domestic fire. This may be a text about fracturing, scattering and
dispersal; but it is also about the resumption of life, of community and social relations.
It also displays the orders – elemental/ mythic (moon), artificial/technological (explosions
and flares), and domestic (hearthfire) – in and between which Roberts’s poetry as
a whole moves. Central too to its conception is the interplay of axes: we have the
vertical, the defining axis of lyric poetry (images of verticality such as assumption,
descent, flight, geological drilling abound throughout Roberts’s work, along with
intimations of moral uplift, freefall, abjection and dejection); then the horizontal,
the vector of a more ‘naturalist’,
observational
approach. It is also perhaps the axis of historical time (whether imagined as linear
or elliptical), of myth and of futuristic anticipation. And like much of Roberts’s
poetry, however stylised, oblique or encrypted, it is set in a real place, in the
midst of a real event, among real people.
13

‘Swansea Raid’ also reveals Roberts’s characteristic verbal association and linguistic
play: ‘pass out’ sounds military, while ‘glade of magnesium’ sets off the natural
world against the scientific, a frequent device in her work. The flares are like ‘orange
bees’, but this is no ‘bee-loud glade’, though the planes’ menacing thrum stands in
eerie consonance with the Yeatsian image of repose. There is even bilingual wordplay:
in ‘Jerries burden the sky’ the plane’s heavy buzzing is expressed through an
anglicised
echo of the French verb,
bourdonner
, to buzz, in turn taken up by the word ‘drone’. Ready-made phrases or images are
given a twist, diverted into something curious, jolting or sinister such as the text-fragment,
seen in a flash, advertising ‘Cow Cakes’ and ‘read around her hips’. Like the rest
of Roberts’s poetry, ‘Swansea Raid’ is lexically omnivorous: painterly,
technical
, dramatic, full of strange words and shiny magpie diction, the glittering new language
of technological knowhow is spliced with the language of the farm. Among Roberts’s
key words, appropriately enough, are ‘alloy’ and ‘compound’, useful words to bear
in mind when confronted with her use of language and treatment of subject.

Poems
is grounded in a variety places: West Wales, South America, London. Roberts ranges
freely over myth and history (whether Welsh, Greek or Incan), drawing them back to
the domestic and the private. In her work, we are as likely to encounter railroads
and air raids as milking pails
and dishcloths drying on hedges, submerged Incan temples as Cow and Gate lorries.
Characters from Homer or the Mabinogi exist in the same poems, and in the same imaginative
continuum, as cow cakes and Marie Stopes. There are semi-mythical places and science-fictional
locations, archaisms jostle with technical locutions, pastoral comes up against the
futuristic. There are moments of vatic arousal and romantic nationalism, epigraphs
in Welsh, references to Maeterlinck and Hokusai alongside the Dogs of Annwn, Aertex
clothing and Singer sewing machines. There is never the same poem twice, and her range
– public, private, intimate, free and tightly formal – is remarkably broad. Some of
her alleged obscurity, and much of her oblique or inverted syntax, is down to her
tendency to transcribe, unaltered, the idioms and phrases she hears all around her.
While many of her phrases seem cryptic, elliptical or contorted, many are simply unmediated,
direct speech. Her fascination, on the one hand, with dialect (even if it is an idealised
version of the ‘language of the soil’) and, on the other, with the rarefied or specialist
lexicons of science or botany or art history, seem of a piece with modernistic attempts
to bypass the linguistic middle-ground. Roberts’s tone is by turns hieratic, ceremonial,
matter-of-fact and immediate. Often it is all at once. Even her poem-titles are mysterious
and compelling: ‘Raw Salt on Eye’, ‘Ecliptic Blue’, ‘Fifth of the Strata’, ‘Xaquixaguana’.