Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems Read Free

“aluminium”, “Knossos”, S. America, modern painters & so on’, he complained. Eliot,
     who considered the book for Faber, described it as ‘a quite extraordinary affair’
     in a letter of 11 April 1945. Roberts also published, in 1944 with Keidrych’s Druid
     Press, a pamphlet called
Village Dialect
, containing stories and an article on country dialect, in which she ranges over a
     variety of material (from Elizabethan English to Pierre Loti’s
Pêcheur d’Islande
via Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake
), and claims to have ‘arrived at the essence of all languages of the soil’. 9
    Throughout her time in Llanybri, Roberts kept a diary – quirky, observant , funny, but always deeply engaged in the culture of the place and its people. Characteristic
     of her attitude is optimism and toughness of mind, and though she has a complicated
     person’s tendency to idealise the simple life, she is free of the kind of pseudo-Celtic
     sentimentality to which she, an outsider, might easily have succumbed. After a visit
     by Ernest Rhys she complains of his obsession with the Celtic twilight: ‘He was still
     caught up in its aura when he met us, and, frankly, this nauseated me.’ Elsewhere
     she writes of her belief in traditional crafts, before specifying: ‘I do not meanthe retention of arty crafty work of the past, but rather the modern craft that is
     contemporary and is required for practical use in our time.’ She describes air raids,
     the arrival of evacuees, the daily grind of village life and its sustaining friendships;
     but also uses the diary to keep track of her eclectic researches: on butterflies,
     cattle, wild flowers and birds; on coracles, architecture, gravestone lettering and
     Renaissance painters. Several of these researches culminated in essays and articles:
     on Renaissance painters for
Life and Letters To-Day
or on coracles and Welsh architecture for
The Field
. Whether commenting on culture and politics (‘the word
tradition
is really a substitute for fear’) or sketching her neighbours (‘Mrs Treharne […]
     lay or sat in her four-poster bed like a pickled Elizabethan’), the diary is not just
     a pleasure to read but an invaluable document on life on the ‘home front’. It is often
     poignant too, about the loneliness and quiet extremity of her existence:
    I feel chequered with energy. Full of positive red squares and black negative ones. What shall I do? One moment I feel I could draw the moon from its zenith and
     the next I am unbearably listless, can find nothing to interest me in this bare stone
     village. […] I feel cramped and barred from life. Could it be that I dislike the ties
     of married life, that I resent
having
to cook four times a day, wash up, see to the kitchen fire […]? All this when I am
     ‘with child’. […] Now quick again, I feel full of bubbles in the head. (7 March 1940)
    Roberts encountered Tambimuttu, Henry Treece, George Barker, Roy Campbell, Kathleen
     Raine and others, poets associated with the New Romantic and ‘Apocalypse’ groupings.
     She also knew the Anglo-Welsh poets – not just Dylan Thomas, but R.S. Thomas, Glyn
     Jones and Vernon Watkins. She was familiar, largely through translation, with Welsh-language poetry from the earliest literature to the work of her contemporaries , and several of her own poems experiment with the
englyn
, a traditional Welsh strict metre form. Roberts also read, and attended readings by, Auden, MacNeice and Day Lewis, and the influence of these poets has been underexplored
     – on her conception of the long poem for instance, not to mention her interest in
     the moving image, film and sound and mass media. Of the established modernists she
     knew and read Eliot and David Jones, as well as the work of poets and critics, like
     Laura Riding and Graves, who set themselves against modernism. Her diary, letters
     and autobiography contain many fine, lapidary or humorous vignettes of the literary world of the time: