Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems (6 page)

BOOK: Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems
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My greatest debt of thanks goes to Lynette’s daughter, Angharad Rhys, a generous source
of help and humour who made the work both fascinating and enjoyable. I am grateful
too to her brother, Prydein. This book, and my part in it, is for them.

No one who has worked on Lynette Roberts can fail to be grateful to her critics and
advocates. Most notably Tony Conran, Nate Dorward, Keith Tuma, John Pikoulis, Nigel
Wheale and John Wilkinson have all in different ways made compelling cases for her
stature and interest, and kept the memory of her remarkable poetry alive.

It was Francesca Rhydderch of
New Welsh Review
who first gave me, a newcomer to Wales and to Lynette Roberts, the space to follow
up on my enthusiasm. It’s a happy debt to record. The
London Review of Books
printed several of Roberts’s previously unpublished poems, and
New Welsh
Review
first published her talk on her South American poems. It’s good to be able to thank
Judith Willson once again for seeing the book through and contributing so much to
its conception and presentation. Chris Miller, Charles Mundye, Angharad Price and
M. Wynn Thomas gave invaluable advice on matters of interpretation, contextualisation
and translation, and Ozi and Hilary Osmond were inspiring guides to the landscapes
of Lynette’s poems:
diolch o galon i chi
.

Patrick McGuinness
2005

Obvious errors of spelling and typography have been corrected, spelling and presentation
have been made consistent, and some older conventions have been modernised.
Poems
and
Gods with Stainless Ears
are presented here as they originally appeared, with Roberts’s own notes at the back
of each volume. The editor’s notes are in the conventional place at the back of the
book.

The Lynette Roberts papers are held at the Humanities Research Center at the University
of Texas at Austin.

Notes

1
Though Roberts is little-known, the critical work on her has by and large been insightful.
Poetry Wales
devoted an invaluable special issue (1983, 19/2) to her, containing essays by Anthony
Conran and John Pikoulis, extracts from her
autobiography
and her correspondence with Roberts Graves. For essays and articles on Roberts, see
especially: Tony Conran, ‘Lynette Roberts: War Poet’, in
The Cost of Strangeness: Essays on the English Poets of Wales
(Llandysul: Gomer, 1983); ‘Lynette Roberts: The Lyric Pieces’ (
Poetry Wales
, 1983, 19/2); and ‘Lynette Roberts’,
Frontiers in Anglo-Welsh Poetry
(Cardiff: University of Wales Press,1997); John Pikoulis, ‘Lynette Roberts and Alun
Lewis’, (
Poetry Wales
1983, 19/2); ‘The Poetry of the Second World War’, in
British Poetry 1900–50
, ed. Gary Day and Brian Docherty (London: Macmillan, 1995). Nigel Wheale, ‘Lynette
Roberts: Legend and Form in the 1940s’,
Critical Quarterly
(1994, 36/3); ‘“Beyond the Trauma Stratus”: Lynette Roberts’
Gods with Stainless Ears
and the Post-War Cultural Landscape’,
Welsh Writing in English
, vol. 3 (1997). Among poets, her work has been of interest principally to those of
an ‘
experimental
’ or ‘avant-garde’ temper. For a profound and updated engagement with Roberts’s themes
and manner, see John Wilkinson’s poem ‘Sarn Helen’,
subtitled
‘Homage to Lynette Roberts and for Friends in Swansea’.

2
Lewis’s poem for Roberts was ‘Peace’ in
Raiders’ Dawn
(1941), an unsettling and oblique poem with a final note of optimism. She told him
‘My poem is real i.e. true of the everyday things I do. Yours is mythical’, and the
poetic exchange is all the more poignant for the fact that three years later Lewis
would be dead. Alun Lewis’s letters to Roberts and Keidrych Rhys appear in
Wales
(February/March, 1948, VIII/28). For an account of the friendship between Lynette
Roberts and Alun Lewis, see John Pikoulis’s essay in the
Poetry Wales
special issue on Lynette Roberts. In the same issue Tony Conran’s essay ‘Lynette
Roberts: The Lyric Pieces’ discusses Roberts’s connections with the Welsh-language
poetic tradition.

3
The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas
, ed. Paul Ferris (London: Dent, 1985), p. 418.

4
Ibid.

5
Quoted in
Poetry Wales
, Lynette Roberts special issue, p. 14.

6
Keidrych Rhys,
The Van Pool and Other Poems
(London: Routledge, 1942), p. 9.

7
Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas
, p. 419.

8
I am grateful to Wynn Thomas for pointing this out to me.

9
Village Dialect
, (Carmarthen: Druid Press, 1944), p. 12. In July 1944 Dylan Thomas wrote ‘Lynette,
who cannot read Welsh, is revising the standard
nineteenth
-century book on Welsh prosody, and also annotating a work on the hedgerows of Carmarthenshire.
I hope she becomes famous & that they will name an insect after her’ (
Collected Letters
, p. 518).

10
Unpublished typescript, untitled and dated 2 September 1943.

11
Nigel Wheale, ‘Lynette Roberts: Legend and Form in the 1940s’, p. 5.

12
Village Dialect
, p. 24.

13
The same raid was witnessed by the artist Arthur Giardelli who  comments on the mismatch
between Roberts’s poem (which he describes as having the feel of a Paul Nash painting)
and the reality it both works on and climbs free of: ‘It isn’t like my experience
at all […] exceedingly dramatic but to me about complete devastation: fires still
burning, smoke, the dash of water out of a pipe hour after hour. […] It is a superb
poem, but she’s using her intellect, her imagination and vision’ (Arthur Giardelli,
Paintings Constructions Relief Sculptures: Conversations with Derek Shiel
(Bridgend: Seren, n.d.), pp. 68–9.

14
Keith Douglas, ‘How to Kill’,
The Complete Poems
(London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p. 119.

15
‘Frostwork and the Mud Vision’
The Cambridge Quarterly
(2002, 31/1), p. 98, a review of Keith Tuma’s
Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

16
‘Simplicity of the Welsh Village’,
The Field
, 7 July 1945, p. 8.

17
Ibid., p. 9.

18
Nigel Wheale, ‘Beyond the Trauma Stratus’, p. 99.

19
‘The Welsh Dragon,
Times Literary Supplement
, 29 August 1952, p. xxxi.

20
Poetry Wales
Lynette Roberts special issue, p. 82.

21
Ibid., p. 84

22
The Eliot-Roberts correspondence dates from summer 1942 to December 1953, and is
unpublished.

23
Anthony Conran,
Frontiers in Anglo-Welsh Poetry
, p. 166.

If you come my way that is

Between now and then, I will offer you

A fist full of rock cress fresh from the bank

The valley tips of garlic red with dew

Cooler than shallots, a breath you can swank

In the village when you come. At noon-day

I will offer you a choice bowl of cawl

Served with a ‘lover’s’ spoon and a chopped spray

Of leeks or savori fach, not used now,

In the old way you’ll understand. The din

Of children singing through the eyelet sheds

Ringing smith hoops, chasing the butt of hens;

Or I can offer you Cwmcelyn spread

With quartz stones from the wild scratchings of men:

You will have to go carefully with clogs

Or thick shoes for it’s treacherous the fen,

The East and West Marshes also have bogs.

Then I’ll do the lights, fill the lamp with oil,

Get coal from the shed, water from the well;

Pluck and draw pigeon with crop of green foil

This your good supper from the lime-tree fell.

A sit by the hearth with blue flames rising,

No talk. Just a stare at ‘Time’ gathering

Healed thoughts, pool insight, like swan sailing

Peace and sound around the home, offering

You a night’s rest and my day’s energy.

You must come – start this pilgrimage

Can you come? – send an ode or elegy

In the old way and raise our heritage.

To speak of everyday things with ease

And arrest the mind to a simpler world

Where living tables are stripped of a cloth;

Of wood on which I washed, sat at peace:

Cooked duck, shot on an evening in peacock cold:

Studied awhile: wrote: baked bread for us both.

But here by the hearth with leisured grace

I prefer to speak of the vulgar clock that drips

With the falling of rain: woodbine tips, and yarrow

Spills, lamp, packet of salt, and twopence of mace

That sit on the shelf edged with a metal strip,

And below, brazier fire that burns our sorrow,

Dries weeping socks above on the rack: that knew

Two angels pinned to the wall – again two.

You want to know about my village.

You should want to know even if you

Don’t want to know about my village.

My village is very small. You could

Pass it with a winning gait. Smile.

They stand in corners plain talking,

Flick the cows passing down our way.

The women – that’s the men,

Pull their aprons over their heads.

They put another around their hips,

Blue sprigged white… so…

Another to cover the one underneath

Pity to spoil: ‘Best Hundredweight of

Cow Cakes’: sacking stitched and homemade.

Now we are used to such things

Never laugh at their ways for

Our own asides carry a larger tale.

We sit and sit in a cornered rut

We pine for our love to thin the rhythm

From out of our hearts

WAR
. ‘There’s no sense in it.

Just look at her two lovely eyes

Look at those green big big eyes

And the way she hangs her tail.

Like a weasel. Ferret. Snowball

Running away on the breast of a hill.

WAR
. There’s no sense in it

For us simple people

We all get on so well.

Hal-e-bant.

The cows are on the move.

I must be off on the run:

Hal-e-bant.
pussy drwg
.

Hal-e-bant Fan Fach

Hal-e-bant for the day is long

We must strengthen it:

Ourselves
:

To the cows

Fetch them in.’

Every waiting moment is a fold of sorrow

Pierced within the heart.

Pieces of mind get torn off emotionally,

In large wisps

Like a waif I lie, stillbound to action:

Each waiting hour I stare and see not,

Hum and hear not, nor, care I how long

The lode mood lasts.

My eyes are raw and wide apart

Stiffened by the salt bar

That separates us.

You so far;

I at ease at the hearth

Glowing for a welcome

From your heart.

Each beating moment crosses my dream

So that wise things cannot pass

As we had planned.

Woe for all of us: supporting those

Who like us fail to steel their hearts,

But keep them wound in clocktight rooms,

Ill found. Unused. Obsessed by time.

Each beating hour

Rings false
.

Stone village, who would know that I lived alone:

Who would know that I suffered a two-edged pain,

Was accused of spycraft to full innate minds with loam,

Was felled innocent, suffered a stain as rare as Cain’s.

Amelia Phillips, who would know that I lived lonely,

Who would know old shrew that your goose’s wing

Did more for me than the plucked asides of daily

Nods: yet I had need of both to prove my sting.

Cold grate, who would know that I craved my love;

Who would know the pain fell twice; could realise

My loss. Only the coloured cries of stars can prove

The cold rise of dawn – understand and advise.

White village, I lost my love. – He went floating

Brushing the wet seas. He stood like a soldier trapped

And thought of me but could not speak. Fighting

Hard he stood, freeing nations the old enemy cramped.

Hard people, will wash up now, bake bread and hang

Dishcloth over the weeping hedge. I can not raise

My mind, for it has gone wandering away with hum

I shall not forget; and your ill-mannered praise.

         I walk and cinder bats riddle my cloak

         I walk to Cwmcelyn ask prophets the way.

‘There is no way they cried crouched on the hoarstone rock

    And the Dogs of Annwn roared louder than of late.’

         ‘Red fever will fall with the maytide blossom

             Fever as red as your cloak. Woe to all men.

         Food-ties will mellow in the bromine season

                   Then willowed peace may be brought.’

                   But what of my love I cried

                   As a curlew stabbed the sand:

             And we cut for the answer. They said

         ‘He would come not as he said he would come

         But later with sailing ice, war glass and fame:

                   Grieve not it is better so.’

                   I left the Bay, wing felled and bogged

                   Kicked the shale despondent and green

                   Heard Rosie say lace curtained in clogs

                   I’ve put a Yule log on your grate.

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