Collected Poems

The work of an original, haunting and experimental woman modernist poet is made available again, for the first in 50 years. Lynette Roberts is principally a war poet, in that her two published collections take as their subject a woman's life in wartime. But she is also, or therefore, a love poet and a poet of the hearth. A late-modernist, she works on two scales at the same time: the mythic and the domestic. Those poets and readers who have valued Roberts' work have been experimentalists. Even at this distance, she challenges and instructs, at the level of diction, syntax and achieved form. She relentlessly opens out the language of poetry, she is free with extremes of subject, scale and conception, and her work has flourished in its very marginality. Now, with republication, she is restored as an extraordinary poet in the development of twentieth century British poetry. As a Welsh writer, her best work stands alongside that of her near-contemporaries, David Jones, R.S. Thomas and Dylan Thomas. As a woman poet, her work bears comparison with that of both Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes.

Table of Contents:
Preface by Angharad Rhys Introduction by Patrick McGuinness Poems (1944) Poem from Llanybri The Shadow Remains Plasnewydd Low Tide Raw Salt on Eye The Circle of C Lamentation Broken Voices Earthbound Spring Rhode Island Red Ecliptic Blue Poem [We must uprise O my people.] Woodpecker Curlew Moorhen Seagulls Fifth of the Strata Thursday September the Tenth House of Commons Crossed and Uncrossed The Seasons Orarium In Sickness and in Health Blood and Scarlet Thorns Rainshiver Royal Mail The New World Argentine Railways Xaquixaguana River Plate Canzone Benedicto Cwmcelyn Notes on Legend and Form Gods with Stainless Ears. A Heroic Poem (1951) Preface Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Notes Uncollected and Unpublished Poems To a Welsh Woman Song of Praise Poem [In steel white land] Englyn Green Madrigal [I] Transgression The Hypnotist (Welsh Englyn) Love is an Outlaw These Words I Write on Crinkled Tin Two Wine Glasses Ty Gwyn The 'Pele' Fetched in A Shot Rabbit Llanstephan Madrigal Displaced Persons Saint Swithin's Pool Brazilian Blue It Was Not Easy Chapel Wrath Trials and Tirades Angharad Prydein Out of a Sixth Sense Green Madrigal [II] Premonition Mockery Red Mullet The Tavern The Temple Road The Grebe He alone could get me out of this The Fifth Pillar of Song Bruska's Song Pendine Release Downbeat Appendix Radio Talk on South American Poems El Dorado (1953) Patagonia (article published in Wales, V, 7, Summer 1945) Notes Index of First Lines

About the Author :
Lynette Roberts was born in Buenos Aires of Welsh family in 1909 and died in West Wales in 1995. She published two collections of poems in her lifetime, both from Faber and Faber: Poems (1944) and Gods with Stainless Ears (subtitled ‘A Heroic Poem’; 1951). She married the Welsh writer and editor Keidrych Rhys. Patrick McGuinness was born in 1968 in Tunisia. In 1998 he won an Eric Gregory Award for poetry from the Society of Authors and his work has appeared in the Independent, PN Review, Poetry Wales, Leviathan and other journals and magazines, as well as the anthology New Poetries II, edited by Michael Schmidt (Carcanet). His first collection, The Canals of Mars, appeared in 2004. Also for Carcanet, McGuinness has translated For Anatole's Tomb by Stephane Mallarme from the French and edited the prose and poems of the Welsh modernist poet Lynette Roberts. He is a fellow of St Anne's College, University of Oxford, where he lectures in French. He lives in Cardiff. In 2009 was made Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes académiques for services to French culture. His second Carcanet collection, Jilted City, was published in 2010. In 2011 he was made Chevalier des Artes et des Lettres by the French government. His academic books include Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (Oxford UP, 2000), Symbolism, Decadence and the fin de siecle (University of Exeter Press, 2000), and he has edited the Penguin Classics edition of Against Nature by J-K Huysmans and T.E. Hulme's Selected Writings for Carcanet. His French Anthologie de la Poesie symboliste et decadente is published by Les Belles Lettres (Paris, 2001).

Review :
FlashPoint review, 24th November 2005: No-one entered the second world war prepared 'to die as cattle'. There is a wariness and intelligent objectivity in the poetry it produced, a wry sense that, after all, no we haven't been here before, this is a different kind of struggle. Laurie Lee's late 1991 memoir A Moment of War captures the mixture of muddling through, idealism and wily self-preservation engendered by the Spanish Civil War, a spirit carried through to the forties. While there was pity and horror, the spectre of Field Marshall Death, still potent in Russia, had become more myth than reality in western Europe. Writers felt that visions of hell were too easy; there was no heaven lying about them to be shattered and shat on. War meant work, deprivation,disruption, misery, all familiar enemies, death not so much fate, more like bad luck. The attitude was to hold tight, piece it together. Maybe that was the only way peace ever couldbe created.This new collection rediscoversa woman's view of a civilian war, a long poem pieced together out of moments of love for and trust in other people; a superb, nearly a great poem. A Heroic Poem as it is subtitled... Publication of Lynette Roberts's Collected Poems is a significant event in the re-assessment of London-published and Anglo-Welsh poetry in the 20th century. Roberts had two collections published by Faber in her lifetime, Poems, 1944, second impression 1945 (clothbound, printed on watermarked Barcham Green paper, priced six shillings) followed byGods with Stainless Ears. A Heroic Poem, 1951 (paper not so good, green cloth, 8/6d). The manuscript Gods, written between 1941-1943, was submitted before the Poems collection. By the time it was published fashion had made it irrelevant. By that time, for example, Hamish Henderson's Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (John Lehmann, 1948) was lying around unregarded in second-hand bookshops, Douglas's Alamein to Zem-Zem piled as a remainder in Smiths for two shillings, 10p a copy. . Roberts herself was soon to give up writing verse. The editor, Patrick McGuinness, prints her two books as found. He adds 36 uncollected or unpublished poems, a BBC radio play El Dorado and the transcript of an associated talk Patagonia given by Roberts on her childhood in South America. McGuinness himself contributes a long, considered and informative introduction together with a touching preface by the poet's daughter, Angharad Rhys. A year or two ago Bradford Haas sent me a copy of the Faber Gods with Stainless Ears, now an uncommon book. Roberts wrote the poem in and around 1942 and sent it to T.S. Eliot later that year. I think I may have been fortunate to read it before the short poems. I liked seriousness of the voice, the energy of the vocabulary and observation. And the formalism of the verse structure delighted me.I found the same qualities in the first published Poems. McGuinness reprints both books as published, preserving the sequence, opening with Poem from Llanybri If you come my way... 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... The notes identify this as an open letter to Alun Lewis, still training in the Royal Engineers establishment at Longmoor, Hampshire, early in the war. The poem uses a traditional style of address, from 'Come live with me and be my love', Robert Frost's 'You come too', and the first lines of Eliot anyone remembers, 'Let us go, then you and I, When evening is spread out against the sky', all of them love poems addressed to the reader, an invitation to read on.With this opening poem Roberts instantly establishes her own clear voice. It is a mark of the professional poet to speak so directly, one to one. Lynette Roberts was born in Buenos Aires 4 July 1909 to an Australian family of Welsh descent. Her father, Cecil Arthur Roberts, was a railway engineer.Appointed to be General Manager of Buenos Aires Western Railways he achieved standing in the expatriot community, owning yachts and racehorses.The family of Lynette's mother, Ruby Garbutt, was also of Welsh descent, originating from Pembrokeshire. Cecil Roberts moved his family to London during the first world war, in which he served and was wounded. Lynette and her sisters, Winifred and Rosemary, returned to school at The Convent of the Sacred Heart in Buenos Aires.The day before Lynette's 14th birthday her mother died of typhus, 3 July 1923.The girls were then sent to school in Bournemouth (I wonder if it was to Canford Cliffs, a school from which a friend of ours ran away twice). Their only brother, Dymock, was sent to school at Winchester, '. but after a mental breakdown was in a mental institution in Salisbury from the age of sixteen' As someone who was privileged to receive a public school education as an impoverished scholarship boy myself - just so you know where I am coming from - I would say this was a transfer from one mental institution to another, less challenging. Never the less Lynette was clearly a well-educated girl and accustomed both to style and strangeness.Not rich though, the money seems to have dwindled to nothing, perhaps finally when her father remarried. All this biographical information comes from McGuinness's introduction, where he tells us that Roberts then went to the Central School of Arts and Crafts, rooming in Museum Street and later in Newman Street in Fitzrovia.After studying with Constance Spry, the celebrated cook and wrencher of flowers, Roberts, aided by her friend, Celia Buckmaster, set up a florists business called BRUSKA. During an interval in their commercial life Roberts and Buckmaster sailed by cargo boat to Madeira, an island known to Roberts, "For the British born in Argentina there are many voyages", as a port of call. Roberts's daughter, Angharad Rhys, writes in her brief preface, 'Lynette found a small house high up the hill and a woman called Angelina to work for them. It was during those long days of freedom that Lynette found her vocation as a poet. She sent a telegram to London announcing "Have found my voice at last"'. From this and other evidence and sub-texts I take it that Roberts had been writing poetry since girlhood.The majority of her lyric poems are either about her early days and her father's life, 'nostalgic suadaded ' ... 'during the war, from a Welsh village', or they are about birds, both subjects influenced by W.H.Hudson, about whose reputation Jonathan Bates writes in his The Song of the Earth Picador (Macmillan, 2000). Roberts then was an informed but as yet unformed poet when, breaking off her engagement to a self-styled model for James Bond, she met the Welsh poet and editor William Ronald Rees Jones at a Poetry London event organised by Tambimuttu in 1939. Jones wrote under the name Keidrych Rhys, the name-change legally registered in 1940. Within the year the couple were married 4 October 1939 at Llansteffan (then Llanstephan) the village at the estuary of the Tywi (Towy) estuary later made more famous by Dylan Thomas. The wedding, according to Thomas, who was best man, was notable for the beauty of the bridesmaids, Celia Buckmaster and Kathleen Bellamy, a reporter for the Argentinian newspaper La Nacion, whose articles Roberts had illustrated. Lynette herself, from the photo frontispiece of the book and from another photo on the press release with review copies, was a handsome woman. There are portrait drawings of her by Wyndham Lewis dated 1948. It is pertinent to note she is listed as the owner of Lewis's Inca with Birds (1933) shown at the Leicester Galleries in 1937 and reproduced by Myfanwy Evans in The Pavilion (plate 12), an oil painting in which, according to C Handley-Read, The Art of Wyndham Lewis's 'the lightly drawn birds have a significance out of all proportion to their weight and treatment... they are responsible for the disquieting and dreamlike air pervading the whole scene... as a result of the birds the picture stirs the imagination, haunts the memory'.This could be a description of any of Roberts's own bird poems. Through the war years Roberts wrote and studied in quiet penury in a rented cottage at Llanybri. She suffered a miscarriage in March 1940. Rhys was called up in July 1940, with postings to the Orkneys, Yarmouth and Dover. He then went AWOL (absent without leave - i.e. temporary desertion) in 1942. He was transferred to the Ministry of Information. Between times the couple made frequent visits to London together. At the end of the war their two children were born, Angharad in May 1945 and Prydein in November 1946. In 1949 the couple were divorced, the children staying with Lynette. Through the war years Lynette met and corresponded with T.S. Eliot at Faber. Robert Graves became a friend - he acknowledges her contribution to The White Goddess which Faber published in 1948. Her Faber 1944 Poems acknowledges previous publications in Life and Letters Today,Tribune (edited by George Orwell), Horizon, Poetry London , Penguin New Writing, Agonia (Buenos Aires), New Directions and The Field. Keidrych Rhys of course published her in Wales, of which he was the brilliant founder editor and shaper. Wales first appeared in April 1937 as a fortnightly poetry review, and closed down after eleven issues in 1940. It was restarted in July 1943. Llanybri, pronounced approximately clan ubree, is a half-hour walk from Llansteffan and a similar walk and ferry-ride from Laugharne. The third issue of Wales, Spring 1944, has most ofthe text of 'Village Dialect', Lynette's affectionate and wondering account of her neighbours in Llanybri and Cwmcelyn, hamlets and settlements around the Y-shaped estuary of the Tywi and the Taf.With Laugharne at its heart, this remains one of the most magical stretches of the superb Welsh coastline, OS Landranger map Swansea & Gower, No 159, grid reference 3112. A few miles inland lie Jeremy Taylor's Goldengrove, the Paxton Tower, and the other side of the floodplain valley, Dryslwyn Castle and Dyer's Grongar Hill overlooking the newly restored garden of Aberglasney at Llangathen. 'Village Dialect', using the Wales typesetting (printed by The Western Mail & Echo's Tudor Press, Cardiff) was also published in 1944 by Rhys's Druid Press, from which R.S. Thomas's two first books later appeared. This orange-wrappered booklet is worth searching for, though it is scarce - full title An Introduction to Village Dialect with Seven Stories. The magazine omits the last two stories, Swansea Raid and Fisherman. Since it has the tempo of a prose poem, it is a pity the text could not be fitted into this Carcanet collection. Dylan Thomas's 1944 radio piece Quite Early One Morning is partly based on Laugharne, from which he dreamed up the small town of Llaregub (Bugger all) in Under Milk Wood c1950. Thomas first visited Llanybri in 1934 with Glyn Jones, who owned a car. The ancestors of both of them were buried in the churchyard there, within walking distance of Blaen Cwm, a pair of cottages owned by Thomas's mother's family. A mile away lies Fern Hill farm. Glyn Jones, as forgotten outside Wales as Lynette, appears in Modern Welsh Poetry, Keidrych Rhys's anthology published by Faber in 1944. Jones's 'Park' is a beautifully composed poem, owing something perhaps to Montale's 'Hastings'. The Welsh flow to it exceeds Roberts's versification skills though Lynette was a more ambitious and original poet. Rhys includes eight of her poems in the anthology, including the most Welsh-nationalist lines from Gods with Stainless Ears. Perhaps it was her choice, or maybe it was 'political'. The anthology also included Dylan Thomas of course, David Jones, Vernon Watkins, their friend Alun Lewis and the relatively unknown R.S. Thomas.Rhys's selection from his owns work includes his Ephemerae for Bruska: it tells of heroes: These, without apparent purpose; what the postcards say Of their pictured leap over stone She who taught a bird the word (a fly in my eye) Or of Arthur's hound hunting boar and sow Is rum. Though now dawn spirits squint at water's dawn stone. maybe it is husband and wife in a later stanza, 'the lidded couple beside the misty lake / On their way to Woolworths;' (as an aside, when I worked in the Welsh valleys in the 1950's the local usage, strange to my ears, was Woolworth). The references to Welsh folklore are beyond my recognition. The final line of the poem, 'And we learnt madness by degree and ate our father's hearts.' has a future pathos. The Roberts selection includes 'The Circle of C', included in Poems, which has the line 'As a curlew stabbed the sand'. In a note the poet writes '...curlews crying at night are said to hunt for souls of the dead. I have used this image as an interpretation of the raiders droning over the estuary and the hill..' The most striking of her bird poems, Curlew: A curlew hovers and haunts the room. On bare boards creak its filleted feet: For freedom intones four notes of doom, Crept, slept, wept, kept, under aerial gloom: With Europe restless in hss wing beat, A curlew hovers and haunts the room: demonstrates the metaphysical dimension common to all Roberts's best verse. Evocations of Hopkins in that accented hss and further in the poem as printed in the Faber edition: Wail-nng...pal-nng...a desolate phantom accents omitted in the new edition. It was instructive to hear this poem beautifully read by Margot Morgan at a launch of the book in Swansea early this November, with no spurious attempt at avian histrionics. A good actor makes a better reader aloud of such lines for an audience, simply because it is a pleasure to listen to a cogent human voice. However, a poet's own reading, uncomfortable though it can be, is always the true poem to be listened-for silently in the head, as a solitary reader, where the words can be accented in the verbal abstract, a place dear to Roberts's universe.The four italicised rhymes, Crept, slept, wept, kept, are similarly placed for the eye and the understanding. They are riders that direct the destination of the form, indicate a road the poet will not take, pre-echoing Veronica Forrest-Thomson's c1975 'Address to the Reader': DANGER SUBMERGED STRUCTURES and all at once Transformational Grammar "peoples" the "emotional landscape" The rhythms of two poems in sapphics follow the pun of the title of the first of them, 'Crossed and Uncrossed'.Its first line, 'Heard the stream rising from the chill blue bricks' requires emphasis on the word 'blue' to realise the perfect balance of the poet's ear for the weight of words. These poems owe something, mainly example, to Thomas Hardy's superb first poem in his first collection, 'The Temporary the All' inWessex Poems, 1898.Rather like Forrest-Thomson, Roberts habitually refers back to earlier poets and to proverbial speech. Plasnewydd (the word means New Place - as best known from the Ladies of Llangollen - with a Shakespearean under-voice) opens with an Eliot trick of inversion: You want to know about my village. You should want to know even if you Don't want to know about my village. Yet also, as though in homage to Eliot's demotic games, there is a strong echo here of a music-hall joke at the time, now less acceptable, of an East-End toyshop owner, who storms out of his shop to berate a woman with a small child looking in at the dolls: 'You wanna buy my good, buy my goods! You don't wanna buy my goods, take your baby's dirty nose off my window!'. But beyond all this there is the desire and aim, shared by W.S.Graham, 'To speak of everyday things with ease', the first line of another early poem. Two more quotes from the shorter poems, from 'Thursday September the Tenth': Who polished this day? String of mackerel and glue Sized and scoured sky to its finest grain of blue: Flashed motor spirit though each splint of wing; drew And transfixed man at his most monstrous art of war: Picked out world mildew and muddled indifference; saw Heart, pressure of steel, culled into shadowed claw Sharpen infinity... The sentence ends five lines later. Really a great poem. More problematic, deeper layered still, from the middle of the final poem, pre-printed in the first Faber collection, 'Cwmcelyn' (Roberts's note, 'Pronounced Coom-kel-in, meaning 'The Valley of Holly'): He, of Bethlehem treading a campaign Of clouds, the fleecy cade purring at his side: this I had read, as who wouldn't, as a reference to Jesus Christ, and looking up 'cade' found a wealth ofapt meanings. Lynette requires her readers to have a dictionary handy - she creates a vocabulary for each poem in the way a painter selects a palette and delights in the availability of a new colour.Now Patrick McGuinness in his introduction reveals that Keidrych Rhys in his autobiographical poem 'The Prodigal Speaks', wrote: Yes born on Boxing Day among the childlike virgin hills [...] Middle of a war; hamlet called Bethlehem; one shop; chapel. Almost a second Christ! and suggests Lynette had this poem in mind. Yes very likely, his wife, her self-mocking Hamlet from a hamlet.Her poems, like her drawing - the book reproduces in black and white a lovely painting of Llanybri Old Chapel - have lightness, sometimes a wonderful sense of fun and mischief within the seriousness of her voice. 'Cwmcelyn' being a section excerpted from Gods with Stainless Ears. A Heroic Poem, it is right it should appear twice in the New Collected Poems which, as mentioned, should have preceded the 1944 Poems but had to wait for publication until 1951. Half a century later we can read it in historical context. A long poem as fine, clear and complex as this about war by a woman writer is a rare treasure. The excellence of the writing lies in the relationship created between locality and the distances and presences (the Swansea raids) of war. The dimensions of the construction of the poem suggest a tesseract, a four dimensional cube: the immediate: the 'eternal'; subjective physicality: objective consciousness; the referential rhythms of speech and language: the abstract reverence of the contemplation of meaning in words; words as communication: words as pattern; the order of nature: 'the order of angels'. 'Finally', she writes in her introduction, 'when I wrote this poem, the scenes and visions ran before me like a newsreel...the poem was written for filming, especially Part V, where the soldier and his girl walk in fourth dimension among the clouds and visit the outer strata of our planet'. I imagine Roberts had read Eisenstein's essays on montage. She will certainly have known Tambimuttu's undistinguished 'Out of This War: A Poem' (The Fortune Press), completed in October 1940 in six sections, three of which appeared earlier in periodicals, e.g. such lines as,'The planet years/ Return from spaces of white light'. Roberts opens her poem where she lives, 'a bay wild with birds and somewhat secluded from man': Today the same tide leans back, blue rinsing bay, With new beaks scissoring the air, a care-away Cadence of sight and sound, poets and men Rediscovering them. Saline mud. Siltering, wet with marshpinks, fresh as lime stud Whitening fields, gulls and stones attending them; Curlews disputing coverts pipe back: stem Plaintive legs deep in the ironing edge, that Outshines the shale, a railway line washed flat, Or tin splintered from a crab-green cave. This is Saint Cadoc's Day. All this Saint Cadoc's Estuary: and that bell tolling, Abbey paddock. In the second section 'The challenge arises to all people to discard their sorrow, break through destruction and outshine the sun'.A 'healing hand and images of home' are offered by the girl narrator to her gunner, sick and dispirited in the artillery. With magic and craft To heel. Without abbreviation or contraction Take thou my lover 4 pints from the 'Farmers' Arms' Or, if flat, 6 tankards from Jones 'Black Horse'. Not supplying either sip homeward Sloe-gin from Merlin's desk or board 'Cow and Gate' Lorry. Up to Carmarthen: to the wine merchant'; mention Vicar's name, demand whiskey 'Old Parr', Mix. Let a mixture be made. Let him my lover Take one silver tablespoonful out of IN. The final section opens with a quotation in Welsh from Revelations - 'Death on a pale horse'. The poem becomes centred in time and place: Out of it. Out of it. To a ceiling and a clarity Of Peace. Sweet white air varied as syllables... But timeless minds held us victims To the sour truth. War and responsibility. He, of Bethlehem treading a campaign Of clouds the fleecy cade purring at his side: Sun, serene sense, tinting the page of his face roan. Bent over a wooden table and glazed chart And with compass and astronomical calculations He, again at my side, pricked lines and projected Latitudes so that we stood and cared not How, upside down over South American canes, Boots proved cumbersome at the height. Bleak battledress Irritating as old salvaged reed collar... A grief already told. Cumbersome boots?Her unmilitary husband not Christ after all, but a second Comberbache, the name under which the hapless Coleridge enlisted only to be almost at once discharged. Patrick McGuinness draws attention to another poem, 'Raw Salt on Eye', which records the difficulties of living in the village by herself while Rhys was away, when she was gossiped to be a German spy (much as D.H. Lawrence and his wife in Cornwall in the previous war): Hard people, I 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 him I shall not forget; and your ill-mannered praise. Yet as 'Village Dialect' shows, she fitted into the hard life. It can happen that original poets achieve initial publication and recognition only to be dismissed and forgotten in their lifetimes. Two-book poets. Clare is a classic example, Ivor Gurney another. Morris Cox's Whirligig spiked at birth by a lone hostile review from the composer Vaughan Williams. Like Roberts, these three poets wrote at a time of war and rumours of war. They failed when peace brought a change of sensibility, a change of voice and music. Poets of Roberts's generation were children or teenagers at the time of the 1914-18 war. They served in or endured the 1939-45 war. They experienced the 1920's slump, the nervous thirties and the cold miserable years of the late forties in Britain followed by another financial crisis in the early fifties. Roberts completed a third collection, The Fifth Pillar of Song, which was rejected by Faber. Apparently this manuscript is lost. Having mentioned Cox, it is interesting to compare his nature poems (which he had to print himself) with Roberts's 'Rainshiver' included here - the kind of poem Larkin and Amis helped to make unpublishable in the fifties. McGuinness prints Lynette's explanation of how her poem came to be written (some years after Cox's poems, though published earlier). After the departure of Rhys in 1948 the address of Lynette and the two young children was 'The Caravan', 'The Graveyard', 'Laugharne'. Later the caravan was moved to Bells Wood, Hertfordshire, then to Chislehurst, where Lynette set up an arts centre in Chislehurst Caves, 1955-56, moves recorded by Angharad Rhys in her preface.'Eventually her lovely sister Win bought us a house'.Lynette was still giving poetry readings up to this time. A prose narrative, 'The Endeavour'. Captain Cook's First Voyage to Australia, first published Australia in 1953, was issued in London by Peter Owen 1954.I was delighted that Gloucestershire County Library still had a copy, rebound, last issue dates 1963 and 1983. The narrative reads beautifully, the characterisation is excellent, the form and balance of the story exemplary. I recommend it as a livelier and more enjoyable read than William Golding's sea trilogy. It rings true to itself. Roberts of course has personal experience both of voyages and of exotic fauna, and of the strangeness of encounters with people whose thought processes are alien. Her accounts of storms and wrecks at sea are excellent. Here is a passage describing the end of an eight mile walk by Cook and Banks, a shore interlude, at dusk by the Endeavour River when they reach Australia: The plaintive flutes of the curlews overhead; and the height of a large white bird standing above all other birds in the ebbing tide of the sun. All gathered for their last feed. The ducks in large coveys wheeling round from one sandbank to another, then fading into the darkness of the woods, mingled with the distant cry of the cranes and the peaceful coo of the doves now scattering in wild dashes down onto the soil, then up to murmur again in the low bushes and mangrove trees. Banks did not go on board, but walked instead out towards the setting sun and the reef of birds. The Towy estuary?And Argentina and W.H.Hudson. Throughout her writing life these are markers in her work. Meanwhile the cave at Chislehurst collapsed, the Arts Centre foundered. Glyn Jones urged republication of her work, but Faber were surely right to see no market for it in competition with Larkin and Hughes. W.S. Graham, the poet nearest to her in style and perceptiveness, found life difficult enough across the Severn sea at Madron and Gurnard's Head.Dylan Thomas, another assailed writer in an unfashionable style, seems to have thought poorly of Roberts's work -he uses the word'hysteric' in a recorded sarcastic remark. In fact Roberts did from then on suffer from schizoid depression.Jenny Diski, in a review of Diana Melly's autobiography Take a Girl Like Me in the London Review of Books, 17 November 2005, writes of 'that curious period in the late 1950's and 1960's when acting out neurosis, particularly in young women, was de rigeur...It was the behaviour of choice, just as neurasthenia and hysteria had been ways for women in the previous century...I remember how it seemed to me impossible to be interesting without being mad.'While in Roberts' case there was obviously a genetic weakness, it is hard not to see these intervals as a result of maltreatment by fate, the hard luck of a difficult life.Who'd be a poet!As Hamburger has it, a mug's game. Again the parallels with Clare and Gurney. McGuinness raises the academic question of where to place poets like Roberts, quirky, individual, to a great extent loners, on the 'graph' of recognition.He quotes an essay by Tony Conran on Roberts that I have not been able to obtain. Like some of the poets already mentioned, and as with David Jones, Bunting, Zukofsky, the idiom, the vocabulary and the referential fields of such poets commonly ignores fashion and contemporary reputation. The books are often unsympathetically reviewed, if reviewed at all. The poets don't belong to any groups, rarely live centrally (the New York, the West Coast, the London scenes) and essentially their books are less comfortable to read than those of mainstream poets. They need to be tuned in to. If a writer moves to a new country, as Roberts did, or by the fact of becoming a writer moves from one class culture to another, writing becomes in both senses of the word a displacement activity. The demands of the new culture, new language or idiom, lead to a more conscious and burdened thoughtfulness of style, usually a searching back and forward to alternative literary models. Roberts wrote in 'Village Dialect': 'I am compelled to raise certain manuscripts out of the dust; and I will examine these in as clear and sound a manner as possoble'. She also wrote, 'the word tradition is really a substitute for fear'. There can't be much doubt she was totally inspired to her best work by that corner of Wales. Roberts incorporated into her writing a living regional equivalent of the liveliness which Pasternak found when translating Shakespeare. 'It is a rhythm which reflects the enviable laconic quality of English, a quality which makes it possible to compress a whole statement, made up of two or more contrasted propositions, into a single line of iambic verse. It is the rhythm of free speech, the language of a man who sets up no idols and is therefore honest and concise'. (Translating Shakespeare, translated by Manya Harari, The Twentieth Century, Vol 164, No 979, September 1958). McGuinness described a visit to Roberts's haunts at Laugharne, where an irate house-owner emerged, fed up to the teeth with pilgrimage tourists (presumably mainly Dylan Thomas fans), and dismayed to hear the mad woman's poetry was going to be re-issued. "That will be political" he muttered.I hope there is a political market, along with every other market, for Roberts. At the foot of page 8 of 'Village Dialect' she writes, ' I do not wish to imply that these plays are in any way Welsh. They are not. But I should like to point out that there may be more Welsh influence in them than has so far been admitted.'. This would be the Welsh way of saying what you mean then. Not that everyone likes that brashness.I asked a Welsh friend about Roberts, had he read her books, or heard of her?He said no, he hadn't, then looked at the floor and hesitated, 'She would be what we call an Anglo-Welsh poet. My own interest is, just happens to be, in North Wales'. Another look at the floor and further hesitation, then he said, 'There is a chasm between North and South Wales'. Two Welsh traditions then in Roberts, the speech of the people around her, and the literature and mythology of past glories. A couple of textual queries; first, an intrusive the in the first line of Englyn, if the version in Modern Welsh Poetry is to be trusted, 'Where poverty strikes (the) pavement- there is found..'.The other query concerns the same anthology, from which her first poem is not included. Is there some question over attribution? TO THE PRIEST OF THE MIDDLES (concerning the New Order) If there is to be freedom of mind and face, If there is to be a mind of different weight, Then there can be no equality of race, Neither of mind nor face; for the late Mind might want what a quick mind could ban. To give face and freedom to mass production And cramp our mind to the dead-piece, can Hardly mature equality of race, station The heart socially. It would merely provoke Late mind to mud and quick mind to silver: Hard 'middles' is the answer: thus to invoke I am content to stay a cottage harbinger Content to express the fury of a kind At this attack on the precincts of a mind. What is being said here I think relates to the last four lines of a rather longer uncollected poem, pp84-85 in the new book, on God's seven days of creation. A good strong feminist Welsh egalitarian view of things to end with. Eve speaks: This, she said, and meant it for thousands of years after, 'Boss, this is a man's game it is the religion of man Just who created woman and where do we come in... The seventh day is lousy it is our worst ever.' Following the collapse of the Chislehurst Caves project Lynette became a Jehovah's Witness. In 1970 she returned to Llanybri. Four times she was admitted to a hospital in Carmarthen suffering from schizophrenia. Her final years from 1989 were spent at a residential home overlooking Llansteffan, where she 26 September 1995 and is buried in Llanybri churchyard. Charles Bainbridge, The Guardian, Saturday 11th March 2006: Around my cradled self Lynette Roberts's poetic voice still rings strikingly clear after 50 years, says Charles Bainbridge "Downbeat", the final lyric in this long-awaited edition of the Collected Poems of Lynette Roberts, is wonderfully immediate. The scene is Laugharne churchyard, probably in 1949, and Roberts is living there in a caravan: Sitting surrounded by wasps, My only view in this lovely And sad caravan Are the graves and tombs filling Each window pane Clustering up the sweet earth. From the front window she sees men arranging sheaves of barley "into a platform of dry trash". This image leads to the poem's extraordinary, defiant ending: "So the rats will come and their omens / But with them with more hop and joy / Fearless birds of splendid plumage." Those birds are a reference to herself and to her writing. Exotic, daring, larger than life, Roberts shone throughout the 1940s, impressing such diverse figures as Robert Graves, TS Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Alun Lewis. In 1939 she married Keidrych Rhys, editor of the influential journal Wales. It was the height of the mid-century Welsh renaissance. Dylan Thomas was best man at the wedding. Roberts was born in 1909 in Buenos Aires to a family with strong Welsh traditions, and in many ways her marriage and the subsequent move from London to the village of Llanybri was an attempt to move to a kind of homeland. It was an event that was fraught with tensions, but one that enabled her to produce, in just over a decade, an extraordinary and unique body of work. Poems, published by Faber in 1944, is a remarkable book about wartime and about the daily routines of the home and the village. Some pieces celebrate her sense of belonging ("You want to know about my village"), others are more ambivalent ("To the village of lace and stone / Came strangers. I was one of these"). Many of the poems interweave the personal and the public to great effect. 'Lamentation' describes the results of a bombing raid at the same time as evoking her miscarriage - "But my loss. My loss is deeper / Than Rosie's of Chapel House Farm / For I met death before birth." While she was producing these clear, direct pieces she was also writing more complex and demanding poems, the most outstanding example of which is the book-length sequence Gods With Stainless Ears, published in 1951. Part IV deals with her miscarriage in a strikingly different way to 'Lamentation'. The language is challenging, idiosyncratic, at first echoing the more surreal techniques of Dylan Thomas: "I, rimmeled, awake before the dressing sun: / Alone I, pent up incinerator, serf of satellite gloom / Cower around my cradled self." This is a kind of vigorous expressionism - her body recast as an incinerator, a destroyer - and this deliberate confusion builds to the inescapable clarity of the lines: "But reality worse than pain intrudes, / And no near doctor for six days." The poem as a whole is remarkable: difficult, exotic, sensual, laden with striking imagery, it evokes the wartime experience of two lovers. There is nothing else like it in the literature of the time. Her poetry has been out of print for nearly 50 years. In 1956 she had a severe breakdown and stopped writing. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she spent time in and out of mental institutions until her death in 1995. Collected Poems finally gathers together her two published books of poetry along with prose pieces and uncollected poems, of which 'Downbeat' is a wonderful example. Sam Burson, Western Mail, March 11th, 2006: The return of a curious girl She was praised by Dylan Thomas, TS Eliot and Robert Graves as a wonderful poet. So why did writer Lynette Roberts lose her love affair with literature? THE gravestone in the small village of Llanybri, Carmarthenshire, is one not enough people will visit. It is a certainly a modest shrine compared to the Dylan Thomas Boathouse. Just 10 miles away in Laugharne, thousands arrive each year in appreciation of one of the most famous of famous Welsh poets. But many spending time in Dylan's former haven will never have heard of Lynette Roberts, (whose wedding Dylan Thomas attended as best man), and will never appreciate her vastly underestimated role as another of Wales' most important poets. Indeed, the work of the Argentine-born writer was highly praised by TS Eliot and Robert Graves. It was Eliot, a friend and editor at Faber and Faber, who encouraged her poetic ambitions, and published her two books of verse in 1944 and 1951. He said of the first, 'She has, first, an unusual gift for observation and evocation of scenery and place, whether it is in Wales or her native South America; second, a gift for verse construction, influenced by the Welsh tradition, which is evident in her freer verse as well as in stricter forms; and third, an original idiom and tone of speech.' Meanwhile Graves, for whom she worked as a researcher for The White Goddess, once wrote, 'Lynette Roberts is one of the few true poets now writing. Her best is the best.' But despite such praise and talent, her critical success was, for many, frustratingly short lived. Because by her early 40s, she had written her last poem. She became a Jehovah's Witness, lost all interest in literature, and, by the time of her death in 1995 at a nursing home in Ferryside, had been out of print for nearly 50 years. Suffering from schizophrenia, she was committed to a Carmarthenshire mental hospital four times. And until recently, just a small number of poets and critics were aware of her. However Lynette's work is now enjoying a new surge of interest. A new edition of her poems, including her two published books and several dozen unpublished works, appeared from Carcanet last year, edited and with an introduction by poet and critic Patrick McGuinness. Her prose, including a war diary, an autobiography and uncollected or unpublished articles and memoirs, is due to appear, also from Carcanet, next year. The republication is being seen as a major addition to the understanding of the British modernist tradition, and of Welsh poetry's contribution to it. It is also something which has pleased her daughter Angharad Rhys. But Angharad, who works as a writer in London, wants to ensure her mother is remembered for more than just her poetry. She said, "The poems were written at a very sad time in her life, but what most people don't under-stand is that she was a very cheerful and positive person. People get put into slots and I don't want people feeling that she was a depressed individual. The people who have met her all remember she was good fun. Even when I was pushing her around in a wheelchair, she wa still pinching people's bums, and pretending it wasn't her.' Angharad said of her mother's abrupt cessation of writing, 'If you're published by TS Eliot it's wonderful, but it's always a struggle, because you're thinking about the next thing to publish. Later she had some stuff rejected from magazines, and she had always been interested in lots of different things anyway.' As well as being a keen and talented painter, Lynette was not without her grand ideas. Angharad recalled of her time in Kent, 'In the '50s she wanted to start an underground art gallery in caves, where there would be a sculptor working. Unfortunately as one was chiselling the walls into shape, the cave collapsed around the sculptor's ears. He was OK in the end, but that was the end of that idea.' Angharad, 60, and her brother Prydein, 59, were the result of Lynette's marriage to Keidrych Rhys. She married the flamboyant magazine editor after breaking off an engagement to Merlin Minshall, a racing driver and real-life spy, who was said to be the inspiration for Ian Fleming's James Bond. The couple lived in Llanybri throughout the war, where Lynette wrote her poetry, but she was often unhappy with the role of housewife, and the marriage had broken up to 1948. She moved to London, but suffered a mental breakdown in 1956 after a string of failed projects. She returned to Llanybri in 1970, and eventually to Towy Haven Residential Home, in Ferryside, in 1989. In December 1994, Lynette fell and broke her hip while dancing, and later had a heart attack in hospital. She died of heart failure on September, 26, 1995, at Towy Haven, and was buried in Llanybri. Dylan Thomas once remembered Lynette as, 'A curious girl, a poet, as they say, in her own right with all the symptoms of hysteria.' Steven Matthews,Poetry Review Issue 96:1, Spring 2006: I Think Alone Perhaps the most surprising thing about this Collected Poems is that, in many senses, it presents the work of an occasional poet. Virtually all of the work included here was written within a single decade of Roberts's eighty-six year long life. Since that period of intense writing stretches from the early 1940s, the occasion of many of the poems - even when seemingly pastoral or love lyric - is the ground bass of loss and violence which can suddenly devastatingly erupt into ordinary local lives. Roberts was a unique figure, a Welsh poet who was born and lived her young childhood in Argentina. It is only in her 'South American' lyrics that the immediate shadow of the contemporary war is lifted. At this partly-imagined, partly-recalled remove, the celebration of nature can be unreserved, if never without unexpected purpose, as in these lines of stark contrast at the end of 'Royal Mail': Outside sweating gourds Dripping rind and peel; yet inside cool as lemon, Orange, avocado pear. While in this damp and stony stare of a village Such images are unknown: So would I think upon these things In the event that someday I shall return to my native surf And feel again the urgency of sun and soil. The yearning for urgency is typical, and releases the energies in many of the lyrics in the first part of this book. Roberts is a strikingly ambitious poet, given the brevity of her writing life; ambitious in her use of form to enhance the vigour of the poetry's speaking voice. This collection contains experiments in Welsh forms alongside Greek metrics, ballads, sonnets, even villanelles. But it is the invigilated restlessness, and concurrent desire for settledness, a kind of impatience with the expressive possibilities of any one form or statement, which create the excitement when reading her work. Even within a single poem, the transitions are abrupt and revelatory. 'The Shadow Remains', one of several poems voicing the plight of the woman left behind by the soldier gone to war, is about the thwarting in these conditions of ability "to speak of everyday things with ease". Instead, the woman must more honestly speak of the shiftlessness of this life, and of the [...] brazier fire that burns our sorrow, Dries weeping socks above on the rack: that knew Two angels pinned on the wall - again two. The work I have quoted so far comes from the first book gathered in this Collected, the small volume poems which appeared under T. S. Eliot's editorship from Faber in 1944. A mini-epic, Gods With Stainless Ears, in which war again intervenes disastrously in the relationship of two lovers, appeared in 1951. Eliot then rejected a third collection and that, it seems, was the end of Roberts's poetry. This edition is enlivened by some of the interchange between Roberts and her editor, as it is also by instances from her correspondence with Robert Graves about her work. In both cases, Roberts writes to her lauded male contemporaries as at least an equal: resisting some of Eliot's suggestions for verbal changes in her work and drawing upon some of her comprehensive knowledge of local myth and legend to inform Graves at the time he was working on The White Goddess. When she seeks to include something of that knowledge in her own work, however, the result is disappointing. After learning to relish the lyrics of Poems, with their sometimes shocking concatenation of subject ('Lamentation', for instance, includes an odd incident when farm animals were killed in an air raid alongside distress at a miscarriage), Gods With Stainless Ears represents a rebarbative experience. Anxious to set her contemporary narrative within recurring cycles, Roberts deploys paradoxically-disruptive syntax and specialist geological or chemical vocabularies. Roberts's own plethora of annotation to each part of Gods perhaps leads the editor of this edition, Patrick McGuinness, to claim that her closest poetic peer was David Jones. But Roberts's work seems to me to lack the "key to all mythologies" drive of Jones. She seems, in her askance and community-focused perspective upon wider dynamics, as in her delight in obscure vocabulary, closer to another of the poets sponsored by Eliot at this time, W. S. Graham. Gods has momentary intensity in its descriptions of the woman left behind, of the conflict between lovers, of the Welsh landscape. But it is in the lyrics of Poems and some of the uncollected later work (the 'Green Madrigals', 'Englyn', 'Premonition') that Roberts's distinctive, strange, and wonderful distillation occurs, as in the opening stanza of 'Ecliptic Blue': In the cold when sea-mews flake the sky With their curmurring fight for the eye Of food on water blue, I think of snow. I think alone. Carcanet are to be praised, as on their similarly well-annotated and -introduced edition of George Oppen a few years ago, for their enterprise and courage in making such questioningly modernist writing available again. There is much in Roberts that should be pondered by, and which will prove instructive for, contemporary writers and readers. Zoë Skoulding, Poetry Wales, Volume 41, Number 4: The current - and overdue - renewal of interest in Lynette Roberts's work has been gathering momentum for some time, but when I first came across an extract from Gods With Stainless Ears in Keith Tuma's 2001 Anthology of Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry, the glacial strangeness of lines like these seemed to come out of nowhere: Air white with cold. Cycloid wind prevails. On ichnolithic plain where no step stirs And winter hardens into plate of ice: Shoots an anthracite glitter of death From their eyes, - these men shine darkly. This collection brings to light work that has been out of print for half a century, allowing a new consideration of a writer whose influence, despite the efforts of enthusiasts like Tony Conran, John Pikoulis, John Wilkinson and Nigel Wheale, has been almost entirely submerged. Patrick McGuinness's edition is both necessary and exciting. Because Roberts has not been widely read, her influence has not been assimilated in the way that those of her more famous contemporaries have been. Nevertheless, her poetry opens up possibilities for experiment that have been too little explored in Wales, and raises issues that remain highly relevant, exploring as it does the construction of an identity between cultures and the effects on language of global communication. Born in 1909 in Argentina of Welsh-descended Australian parents, Roberts wrote most of the poems published here in the 1940s; in 1956 she had a breakdown, became a Jehovah's Witness and stopped writing for the rest of her life. McGuiness calls her an 'insider's outsider', and explains her connection with the better-known literary figures of the mid-twentieth century. She was a friend of Robert Graves; Dylan Thomas was best man at her wedding to Keidrych Rhys, poet and editor of Wales; her work was highly praised by T.S. Eliot and published by Faber. The 'disappearance' of her reputation is therefore something of a mystery. It could be just an accident of timing: her war poetry was not published until 1951, when literary fashion had moved on from those concerns, and the predominance of the Movement poets from the mid-fifties meant that clarity was favoured over the kind of linguistic intoxication to be found in Roberts's best work. Living far from London can't have helped, but in any case she tended to keep her distance from groups with whom she might have been identified. While her isolation led to her work having been forgotten by the mainstream, it also means that she can sound like a new voice at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Her work is of its time but its relationship with our own is different from that of R.S. Thomas or even David Jones, with whom she shares some similarities as a visionary, modernist and war poet. This edition includes the two collections published by Roberts in her lifetime, Poems, from 1944 and Gods With Stainless Ears from 1951. There's also a selection of previously uncollected or unpublished poems, together with an appendix including a radio talk on Roberts's South American poems, a ballad, 'El Dorado', and an article on Patagonia. The poetry in the later sections is not even quality but it's nearly always interesting, and its inclusion reveals Roberts as a writer who was too ambitious not to take risks. McGuinness's contribution as editor is to supplement Roberts's assiduous and quirky notes with some helpful ones of his own, and to provide an excellent introduction that engages warmly with Roberts's unusual life as well as with the critical content of her work. That's the one benefit of having had to wait so long for this book; this is not always easy or immediate poetry and it's an advantage to approach it with some background. Roberts's most important writing was done in Wales, though she only moved here - to a cottage in Llanybri - at the age of thirty. She adopted aspects of the Welsh-language literary tradition with an outsider's temerity. Although she couldn't read Welsh, she used Welsh poems as epigraphs and echoed Welsh forms; overriding the complexity of her own cultural identity, she could address poems to "Cambria" or "my people". McGuinness explains in his introduction how 'she was Welsh by a combination of choice and imaginative will. "Poem from Llanybri" is a cosmopolitan's claim to a rooted culture that is also a culture of rootedness. This poem takes the form of an invitation to Alun Lewis to visit her, enacting gestures of hospitality: "At noon-day / I will offer you a choice bowl of cawl / Served with a 'lover's' spoon", and it end: You must come - start this pilgrimage Can you come? - send an ode or an elegy In the old way and raise our heritage. While she appeals to 'heritage', this is something that has to be performed and recreated in the present. This poem has been widely anthologised, and taken in isolation it could be seen as a celebration of the simple life and traditional rural values. However, its deliberate future tense is as much an idealised projection of herself into a culture as an engagement with the past. Roberts's relationship with Llanybri was far from simple. 'Raw Salt on Eye' describes her life alone in the village during the war while her husband was away: 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. Her language reflects her alienation, 'spycraft'', for example, making her doubly suspect as witch and spy. She often makes the language sound foreign because of the way she echoes archaic or very localised speech patterns, as in the phrase 'who would know.' Similarly, 'full innate' seems unusual because 'full' appears to be an adverb, a usage that survives in a phrase like 'full well', but which sounds idiosyncratic in another context. The phrase is resolved musically by the repetition of its sounds in 'felled innocent', so that jarring dislocation of meaning draws attention to the texture and rhythm of language as it might be heard, overheard, or mis-heard. At the same time, the line suggests minds full of loam so the syntactical oddness also turns the experience of alienation around, making the insularity of the villagers seem as strange as they find the speaker to be. It's a pity that there's a misprint in this poem ('hum' for 'him'), but proof-reading this book can't have been an easy task: as well as the syntactical play there's a magpie delight in picking up words from remote sources and watching them glint in unexpected contexts (T.S. Eliot expressed doubts about some of her more obscure lexical choices, taking particular exception to "zebeline".) There are also neologisms like "mimicrying", used of a butterfly in 'Royal Mail' and explained in the notes as conveying "both sorry and mimicking". Roberts writes out of the modernist condition of estrangement, but also out of the condition, familiar in Wales, of being between languages. This is intensified in her case by her South American background. 'Royal Mail' is a memory of Sao Paulo from the perspective of the "damp and stony stare" of a Welsh village, in which the remembered pace becomes disorientatingly vivid: "the coffee coloured house with its tarmac roof / And spray of tangerine berries." It's hard to imagine the colours here without their associated tastes and smells intruding, so the meaning is destabilized as it slips from sense to sense. The poem builds up to a kind of synaesthetic overload with heat, smell and sound converging: The stench of wine-wood, Saw-dust, maize flour, and basket of birds, With the ear-tipped 'Molto bien signorit' and the hot mood Blazing from the drooping noon. The sounds of the Spanish phrase are echoed in the English words as if the two language have melted together in the heat of the memory. The poem ends with a longing to "return to my native surf / And feel again the urgency of sun and soil," which, as with 'Poem from Llanybri', looks like a firmer indication of belonging than it actually is, given that it's hard to say exactly what "native surf" might be. The dense linguistic surface of Roberts work is immediately striking in Gods With Stainless Ears, subtitled 'A Heroic Poem'. It was written in Llanybri between 1941 and 1943 and the poem is located in the bay and the village, but it's a rural landscape that is shot through with awareness of global conflict and its mythical dimensions: In fear of fate, flying into land Orcadian birds pair And peal away like praying hands; bare Aluminium beak to clinic air; frame Soldier lonely whistling in full corridor train, Ishmaelites wailing through the windowpane, The vertiginous juxtaposition of perspectives is partly achieved through the clash of registers, "aluminium", for example, allowing the bird to morph into an aircraft. It's also the result of a strong emphasis on the visual: Roberts was a painter though, her writing has closer parallels with paintings by Paul Nash, who, like Roberts, was influenced by film in his control of space and form. Newsreel photography was one of the things that made the Second world War seem immediate and all-pervasive and Roberts explains: 'when I wrote this poem, the scenes and visions ran before me like a newsreel. The galley sheets on which I wrote the first draft may be partly responsible for the occurrence. But the poem was written for filming, especially Part V, where the soldier and his girl walk in fourth dimension among the clouds and visit the various outer strata of our planet.' Roberts was determined to engage with everything new, not just in a quest for aesthetic novelty but because she saw poetry's role as being to tackle the modern world on its own terms and in its own language: in her letter to Robert Graves, quoted in the introduction, she says she set out 'to use words inn relation to today - both with regard to sound (i.e. discords ugly grating words) & meaning.' She notices how "OK saltates the cymric hearth and / BBC blares from Bermondsey tongue," and how "old women die folded in skirts, their culture / Entombed"; but she's always listening to the particularities of speech around her - not just Welsh but also the variations within English as it is locally spoken. McGuinness notes a parallel with William Carlos Williams, and as in 'Paterson', direct speech allows the poem to include different perspectives, showing an understanding of a place as an intersection of physical, social and cultural factors at a particular time. However, although her perspective is partly that of a woman in one particular wartime village, her voracious inclusion of scientific, technological and archaic registers extends the scope of her writing far beyond a personal, domestic or local focus. Roberts is always aware of the past, but she also looks forward to a technological post-war future, registering its alien coldness while exploring its lexical possibilities: We by centrifugal force... rose softly... Faded from bloodsight. We, he and I ran On to a steel escalator, the white Electric sun drilling down on the cubed ice; our cyanite flesh chilled on aluminium Rail. The imagery is unnatural and artificial, but for a writer whose work is located between cultures, there isn't a 'natural' way of seeing the world, only a choice of different perspectives. This is perhaps what enables her to approach poetry from so many different angles, moving restlessly between the influences of early Welsh poems and newsreel photography, between Argentina and Wales, and between acute visual and verbal sensibilities. It's complex work, but we live in a more complex world than most people could imagine in 1951; if Roberts was in some ways ahead of her time, the time to read her is now. Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, Issue 176: Insights from an Outsider During the Second World War and for a few years afterwards, Lynette Roberts was recognised as a gifted and highly original poet. Remarkably, her distinctive voice was not muffled by her marriage to Keidrych Rhys, energetic self-promoter and founding editor of the pioneering journal Wales whom she divorced in 1949. From the mid-1950s until her death in 1994, however, bouts of mental illness and membership of the Jehovah's Witnesses tragically brought an end to her literary career. In studies published over the last twenty years or so critics such as Tony Conran and John Pikoulis have reminded us of the quality of her poetry, but a new edition of her work was long overdue. In this volume Patrick McGuinness presents a comprehensive collection of her published and unpublished poetry together with two related prose pieces. During the war, Roberts, who had been born into a comfortably-off family in Argentina, found herself transplanted to the Carmarthenshire village of Llan-y-bri, where in stark contrast to the glamorous literary life she sometimes enjoyed in London, she kept house in primitive conditions, with candles and lamps for lighting, no running water, and cooking on solid fuel, often alone while her husband was away in the services. The aspirations and contradictions of mid-century feminism constantly bubble up: 'Poem from Llanybri', addressed to Alun Lewis, while proudly evoking the homely welcome she will offer, makes no bones about the endless labour cottage life entails for the woman: 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 [...] offering you a night's rest and my day's energy. Yet she produced some of her best work in these conditions, transforming the everyday life in the village into poems where age-old tasks and traditions stand in contrast to modern poetic form. But although her earliest poems reflect experience shared with the local women, there is never total empathy and identification. Class and foreign birth make her very much an outsider, even if one with privileged insights, in so far as women could cross class boundaries more easily than men might, especially in the shared fears and hardships of wartime. But she seems both to relish and regret her status, one foot in the daily life of the village, the other in a privileged, educated, English milieu. Rootless, she first converts to Welshness, even nationalism. Her parents were Australians who emigrated to Argentina before her birth but were, ultimately, of Welsh extraction, and after marrying into Welsh-speaking Wales, she embraced enthusiastically its language, history, literature and traditions, experimenting with welsh poetic forms and using the patterns of colloquial speech in her writing. But she soon began to hanker nostalgically for the warmth and rich colours of South America, producing in around 1941 a series of poems inspired by the country where she had lived until her mid-teens. Later, she was understandably drawn to the stories of the colony of Patagonia, which allowed her to combine welsh and Argentinean strands. Her 1953 verse radio-play, El Dorado, for example, is based on the well-known incident in which three of the colonists were killed by Indians. Interestingly, she owed her knowledge of this story to a 1936 cutting from the English-language Buenos Aires Herald, rather than to any of the earlier Welsh sources: her research often seems more haphazard than methodical. Her infectious enthusiasm for encyclopaedic learning, leaping form history and literature to botany, ornithology, geology, whatever took her fancy, makes for extraordinary richness of imagery with striking juxtapositions. But at the same time the self-conscious, sometimes navve, erudition of the autodidact can make for embarrassing reading. Many of her explanatory notes - their number almost competes with David Jones - are misleading or downright wrong. I was not surprised to learn that it was she who fed Robert graves much of the claptrap of bad translations of texts of dodgy authenticity which lay behind that early New-Agers' bible, The White Goddess. As McGuinness stresses, she has undoubted affinities with the Modernist school, not least in her penchant for specialised, even abstruse language. One of the characteristics of her poetry is the juxtaposition of scientific terms with those relating to nature, the use of hard-edged modern vocabulary of metals or machinery to convey the essence of natural phenomena, or vice versa. Inevitably this vocabulary and imagery have made her work seem difficult to many readers, including T.S. Eliot, though for me it's not so much the words but her syntax which takes some unravelling. However, reading aloud usually reveals the sense. It also makes the syntax less important, allowing us to concentrate on her strongly visual imagery - Roberts trained first as a visual artist before becoming a writer - and on the all-important sound of these poems, the rhythms and alliterations which are part of their essence. Both the diction and very painterly imagery remain extraordinarily fresh, but the choice of words can actually make the poems seem as antiquated as they were then determinedly up-to-date. They reek of post-war optimism in progress through technology before the environment was invented and take me straight back to the 1950s and my mother's Scientific Book Club books, staple reading next to hard toilet-paper on the bathroom shelf. And how many readers can now interpret the mysteries of 'Coats' cotton 48' or still use for machine-sewing a 'Singer's perfect model scrolled with gold'? ('Cwmclyn', page 43; revised version, pp.66-7). The combination of a conventional femininity and modern machinery is again of its time, before the Fifties drove lipsticked women warworkers back from engineering factories to the kitchen sink. Reading Lynette Roberts is like visiting St Fagan's or Ironbridge - the poems are relics of a material culture which I shared with at least two previous generations and whose artefacts museum curators seem no longer to expect anyone outside their profession to recognise. This aspect is reinforced by the explanatory notes: shocking to think that the editor felt the need to explain a Rhode Island Red, a Belisha beacon, or even anthracite. Some of these notes also tend to miss the point, the essential character of the thing which is actually relevant to the meaning in its poetic context: yes, Rimmel (pp. 60, 145) was a cosmetic brand but 'rimmeled' is a French borrowing and means 'wearing mascara.' These are extraordinary and often moving poems, not easy to approach but rewarding to rediscover. Lynette Roberts fully deserves her restoration into the twin canon of twentieth century English-writing in Wales and of women's writing. That illness brought her career to so untimely a close is tragic. Steven Matthews, Poetry Review Volume 96:1 Spring 2006 I Think Alone Perhaps the most surprising thing about this Collected Poems is that, in many senses, it presents the work of an occasional poet. Virtually all of the work included here was written within a single decade of Robert's eighty-six year long life. Since that period of intense writing stretches from the early 1940s, the occasion of many of the poems - even when seemingly pastoral or love lyric - it is the ground bass of love and violence which can suddenly erupt into ordinary local lives. Roberts was a unique figure, a Welsh poet who was born and lived her young childhood in Argentina. It is only in her 'South American' lyrics that the immediate shadow of the contemporary war is lifted. At this partly imagined, partly recalled remove, the celebration of the nature can be unreserved, if never without unexpected purpose, as in these lines of stark contrast at the end of 'Royal Mail': Outside sweating gourds Dripping rind and peel; yet inside cool as lemon, Orange, avacado pear. While in this damp and stony stare of a village Such images are unknown: So would I think upon these things In the event that someday I shall return to my native surf And feel the urgency of sun and soil. The yearning for urgency is typical, and releases the energies in many of the lyrics in the first part of this book. Roberts is a strikingly ambitious poet, given the brevity of her writing life; ambitious in her use of form to enhance the vigour of the poet’s speaking voice. This collection contains experiments in Welsh forms alongside Greek metrics, ballads, sonnets, even villanelles. But it is the invigilated restlessness, and concurrent desire for settled-ness, a kind of impatience with the expressive possibilities of any one form or statement, which create the excitement when reading her work. Even within a single poem, the transitions are abrupt and revelatory. 'The Shadow Remains,' one of several poems voicing the plight of the woman left behind by the soldier gone to war, is abut the thwarting in these conditions of ability ‘to speak of everyday things with ease’. Instead, the woman must more honestly speak of the shiftlessness of this life, and of the (…) brazier fire that burns our sorrow, Dries weeping socks above on the rack: that knew Two angels pinned on the wall "€" again two. The work I have quoted so far comes from the first book gathered in this Collected, the small volume Poems which appeared under T.S.Eliot's editorship from Faber in 1944. A mini-epic, Gods with Stainless Ears, in which war again intervenes disastrously in the relationship of two lovers, appeared in 1951. Eliot then rejected a third collection and that, it seems, was the end of Roberts's poetry. This edition is enlivened by some of the interchange between Roberts and her editor, as it is also by instances from her correspondence with Robert Graves about her work. In both cases, Roberts writes to her lauded male contemporaries as at least an equal: resisting some of Eliot’s suggestions for verbal changes in her work and drawing upon some of her comprehensive knowledge of local myth and legend to inform Graves at the time he was working on The White Goddess. When she seeks to include something of that knowledge in her own work, the result is disappointing. After learning to relish the lyrics of Poems,with their sometimes shocking concatenation of subject (‘Lamentation’, for instance, includes an odd incident when farm animals were killed in an air raid alongside distress at a miscarriage), Gods With Stainless Ears represents a rebarbative experience. Anxiousd to set her contemporary narrative within recurring cycles, Roberts deploys paradoxically disruptive syntax and specialist geological or chemical vocabularies. Robert's own plethora of annotation to each part of Gods perhaps leads the editor of this edition, Patrick McGuinness, to claim that her closest poetic peer was David Jones. But Robert's work seems to me to lack the 'key to all mythologies' drive of Jones. She seems, in her askance and community-focused perspective upon wider dynamics, as in her delight in obscure vocabulary, closer to another of the poets sponsored by Eliot at this time, W.S.Graham. Gods has momentary intensity in its descriptions of the woman left behind, of the conflict between lovers, of the Welsh landscape. But it is in the lyrics of Poems and some of the uncollected later work (the 'Green Madrigals', 'Englyn', 'Premonition') that Roberts's distinctive, strange and wonderful distillation occurs, as in the opening stanza of 'Ecliptic Blue': In the cold when sea-mews flake the sky With their curmurring fight for the eye Of food on water blue, I think of snow. I think alone. Carcanet are to be praised, as on their similarly well-annotated and-introduced edition of George Oppen a few years ago, for their enterprise and courage in making such questioningly modernist writing available again. There is much in Roberts that should be pondered by, and which will prove instructive for, contemporary writers and readers.