Poetry 1900- 2000 One hundred poets from Wales edited by Meic Stephens FOREWORD BY DAFYDD ELIS-THOMAS LIBRARY OF WALES PRAISE FOR POETRY 1900-2000 ‘Poetry 1900-2000 is... a cultural act, and a landmark in the English-language writing of Wales. It is by far the most compre- hensive collection of Welsh poetry in English in the twentieth century which we have had – or are likely to have…. Well- designed and handsomely produced, this wide-ranging and authoritative anthology will be indispensable to those who are new to the English-language poetry of Wales and will bring new poems to the attention of those already familiar with the field.’ Tony Brown, Cambria Magazine ‘This anthology is a wonderful compendium of good poems and poets worth meeting, many worth returning to again and again. But it is also an act of empowerment that reaches beyond indiv- iduals and single artistic genres, in a way that only poetry can.’ Alan Riach, New Welsh Review ‘This is certainly a remarkable book…. It is a fine production…. What is so fundamentally impressive is the high-level intellect, the sheer grinding scholarship…. In future, when students are looking at the details of a Welsh writer’s life and work, they will look into this volume for correct information. Meic Stephens, with his huge knowledge of Welsh writers, has done this editing fairly, sensitively and comprehensively.’ John Idris Jones, Roundyhouse Poetry Magazine ‘The most important thing to say about this book is that it’s a very valuable act of cultural politics…. The second is that it’s great value for money – 877 pages of carefully selected poetry for less than the price of a CD.’ Ian Gregson, Poetry Wales ‘In sum, this is the book that anyone with an interest in Welsh writing in English needs as reference text and source of material and pleasure.’ Sam Adams, PN Review poetRY 1900-2000 EDITOR meic stephens LIBRARY OF WALES Parthian The Old Surgery Napier Street Cardigan SA43 1ED www.parthianbooks.co.uk The Library of Wales is a Welsh Assembly Government initiative which highlights and celebrates Wales’ literary heritage in the English language. Published with the financial support of the Welsh Books Council. Contributions to the cost of paying copyright fees for the poems in this anthology have been made by the University of Glamorgan, the Thomas Ellis Memorial Fund and the Guild of Graduates of the University of Wales. The Library of Wales publishing project is based at Trinity College, Carmarthen, SA31 3EP. www.libraryofwales.org Series Editor: Dai Smith First published in 2007 © The Poets and/or their Estates. Preface © Dafydd Elis-Thomas Editor’s note © Meic Stephens All Rights Reserved ISBN 1-902638-88-3 ISBN 978-1-902638-88-1 Cover design by Marc Jennings Cover image Do not go Gentle into that Good Night by Ceri Richards © Estate of Ceri Richards/DACS 2007 Typeset by logodædaly Printed and bound by Gomer Press, Llandysul, Wales British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A cataloguing record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published. LIBRARY OF WALES preface A preface is literally that, a saying or writing beforehand. Usually, though, they are written afterwards, after a reading of the contents. The purpose especially of the preface to a book such as this is usually to explain or justify what is in it or even to persuade a potential reader to buy it. In the case of this volume in this series this is hardly necessary. After all, the series itself came about in 2005 when the then Minister for Culture in the Welsh Government, Alun Pugh AM, accepted a recommendation from the Culture Committee of the National Assembly that such a series should be funded and published and placed in all schools and libraries. The series is itself a cultural act, yet another feature of the nation-building that had been going on throughout the twentieth century but has proceeded apace since its turn into the twenty-first. That a volume which is an anthology of a century of poetry should be one in the series called the Library of Wales is in one sense self- evident. It is literally again the flowering of the best offerings of a culture. Perhaps it might be more provocative to assert in this preface that without something called poetry existing and associated with and naming a place called Wales during the last century this very series and the political process which led to it would not have happened. Without poetry, even perhaps without ‘Poetry Wales’, Wales at least as we now know it would not have come about. Can poetry or any other art form – drama, films, novels, i music of all kinds, visual art, and dance – be that important? Along with sport of all kinds it is these forms of cultural actions that make us distinctive as human beings. Think how much of our waking time is spent watching, listening, following and supporting all these activities. Every community and society and country does it. We compete around these activities, we celebrate and agonise over them, and we endlessly express criticisms of them. It is through culture or cultures plural that we live. Diversity and difference of cultures and cultural expressions are the very basis of them. If all cultural activities were and looked the same, if everyone sang or danced or played football in the same way, we would have nothing to play or watch or talk about. Differences of form and languages are of the essence of cultures. As we read poems aloud to ourselves, or better still to each other in a group, it is fascinating to try and work out what kind of speaking or writing occasion the poem might most resemble. Is the poet talking to herself? Or is s/he telling a personal story to a close friend, or addressing a person, often an absent lover or a hero from the past? If the person apparently addressed is dead it becomes an elegy, a very classic genre of poetry indeed. Sometimes the voices in the poem – never to be confused with that of the poet herself of course as we all have many voices! – may be almost making a public speech or a declaration of protest. The voice-in-the-poem is never as crude or as hectoring as that of a politician, although a poem may well help us to understand an event by interpretation better than a journalist or historian because of the way in which the ii interpretation is given to us. It is hinted at, gleaned from glints and glimpses, rarely shouting and in-your-face. So too with places and people. There are as many definitions of Wales as there are people and places in it. This is always as it should be. It is true of all countries and cultures, though there will always be those who try to close down the discussion by insisting their version is somehow right, justified usually by a version of the past, and sometimes more frighteningly by a prescribed version of the future. Wales is an open book with open borders, two and many more languages. English- language Wales at one time had to assert itself in its place in the national rain, as once when the editor of this series, Dai Smith, and the writer of this preface shared a platform asserting that ‘English is a Welsh Language’. During that evening the poem entitled ‘Ponies, Twynyrodyn’ by Meic Stephens, the editor of this anthology, was aptly quoted for its resonating closing line ‘exiles all, until the coming thaw’. The coming of that ‘thaw’ between asserted identities, alleged competing ‘heartlands’ and Welshness-es, versions of could-have-been, should-have-been national histories in various Wales-es, are all rehearsed in this anthology. When the thaw came many of us saw that it was quite a different country from either the one we had experienced or the one we imagined it to be. In the making of nations as ‘imagined communities’ the over-active imagination as found in poetry has its own particular role. It can, however, only work that role effec - tively within the other forms of cultural life by being poetry. To work it must not only be composed and written iii as poetry, lyric or otherwise – that is matter that can be safely left to poets – but it must also be read on its own terms. Making sure that it is read as poetry and not expected to be something else is a matter for all of us as readers and critics – and all of us as readers are potentially both! I still think that however much emphasis we quite rightly put on biographical and socio-economic context in our reading there is no substitute for that practice of the close reading of the text of each poem, teasing out the meanings we collectively find there as a group of readers, always reading-out and hopefully not too much reading-in! I hope that this method of teaching poetry as part of the humanities curriculum which I learned as a young teacher from the so-called American New Criticism when it was still relatively new will find its place whenever this hugely broad canvas of an anthology is used as a teaching resource.