The tenor of this volume seems to me to reflect my ambivalence towards the language issue that has long beset Wales and promises to continue to do so for years to come with an increasing imperative. There is something of the orphan in those of us who are born in Wales but within an anglicised household, where there is sometimes no will and little incentive to learn the so-called ‘language of heaven’. These days learning Welsh is compulsory in all Welsh schools and a generation of children have grown up with a working knowledge of the language and, certainly in east Wales, with no desire and little opportunity to speak it once their schooldays are over. My experience as an adult learner was similarly fraught, I seemed to expend a great deal of effort acquiring a little Welsh only to find no opportunity to use it and thereby improve my proficiency. This is why I have long admired R S Thomas, for having learned the language as an adult and deliberately sought out parishes in which he could survive only by using the language everyday. This kind of devotion is rare and I lack his determination.
Many poems in this volume were written in Welsh perhaps as a tribute to Thomas’ long promotion of the language although his own work remained stubbornly in English. It is understandable that a poet should prefer to write in his first language for to do otherwise is to risk the wrath of the language purists, an unforgiving bunch at the best of times. However, English translations have been provided, and to my inexpert eye, they work well. Many of the poems have been written in response to Thomas’ death and take the form of an elegy, others were written when he was very much alive and form part of ongoing conversations, and yet others are parody. All are engaging and offer alternative windows into the character of the man. I hope the following extracts will help to give a flavour of both the man and his relationship with the language, as well as indicating the high quality of this anthology.
This from Roy Ashwell:
'Thomas in his final curacy
and caring now for his soul’s cure only
set his English to the door
and strove in Welsh to make good his end,…
(R.S. Writes His Biography in a new Tongue)
and from John Davies:
‘…We stood accused
of reading him. Wrong
language, place, wrong century…’
(R.S. Thomas)
From Peter Finch there are a number of excellent poems but the one that gets me chuckling is this parody of A Welsh Landscape:
'To live in Wales,
Is to be mumbled at
by re-incarnations of Dylan Thomas
in numerous diverse disguises.’
And reminding me of the cover photograph for Justin Wintle’s ‘Furious Interiors’:
‘Is to be bored
By Welsh visionaries
With wild hair and grey suits.’
And the sheep…
‘And the sheep, the sheep
the bloody flea-bitten Welsh sheep,
chased over the same hills
by a thousand poetic phrases
all saying the same things.
To live in Wales
is to love sheep
and to be afraid
of dragons.’
(A Welsh Wordscape)
And so many superb first lines/verses:
From Menna Elfyn (trans. Gillian Clarke):
‘To wash the world new every morning
that’s the poet’s work.’
(The Poet)
and again:
‘A caress in the dark.
What a tame lot we were,
With our secretive yesterday’s kisses,..’
(Handkerchief Kiss)
and the incomparable Emyr Humphreys:
‘Let it be understood poets
are dangerous: they undermine
the state: they thrust
before congregations hymns
they would prefer not to sing.’
(S.L. i R.S. (An Imagined greeting))
It is impossible to mention every impressive poem in this wonderful anthology so I’ll finish with the hearty recommendation that for and R S Thomas fan, this anthology is much, much more than the sum of its words and a few more lines that spoke volumes to me:
From Owen Sheers:
‘From my father a stammer
like a stick in the spokes of my speech.’
(Inheritance)
From John Powell Ward:
‘Carried over the threshold
As before, a bride in white
But as to the hair this time,
The snowfalls of age
For her final honeymoon.’
(A Bride in White)
and from Daniel Westover:
‘I think about a poet’s barriers.
Half offered by the landscape, half fashioned
with his words, the protective walls
kept actual Wales away
and imagined Wales away from human hands.’
(At Porth Neigwl)
No comments:
Post a Comment