Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems Read Free Page A

Cecil Day Lewis is ‘like a temperate book on a shelf’; MacNeice, ‘bastard-looking:
     excellent delivery of sinewy and satirical verse’; R.S. Thomas, ‘a gloomy sort of
     person – who like most intelligent ministers today doesn’t believe in the church that
     he preaches’. One ofLynette’s most effusive admirers was Edith Sitwell, with whom she corresponded for several years from the early 1940s, and to whom she dedicated
Gods with Stainless Ears
. Lynette’s unpublished account of a tea party with the Sitwells suggests that, despite
     her affection for Edith, she was not comfortable in the Sitwellian
milieu
. ‘Yesterday a wretched day of my life’, she begins, elaborating:
    We walked over to the cool and ornate marble piece to find spread over the whole surface
     Edith Sitwell. Madame Tussaud. Wax. Out of the past. Out of a picture. I was shaken
     more than I had expected to be. And it was over some considerable time before I could
     register all that I saw. 10
    In 1943, Roberts began a correspondence with Robert Graves. Their letters contain
     a fascinating insight into the composition of
The White Goddess
, to which Roberts contributed material and advice on sources, and for which she is
     acknowledged in the foreword to the book. The previous year, in 1942, she had sent
     some poems to T.S. Eliot at Faber, and a few months after a manuscript of
A Heroic Poem
, later to become
Gods with Stainless Ears
. Eliot was interested, though found it ‘stiff going’ and suggested she send him a
     volume of short poems. He asked for the ‘Heroic Poem’ again in 1948, and it was published
     three years later. In the dustjacket notes to
Poems
, Eliot wrote:
    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.
    The acknowledgements to the book reveal the range of journals she published in: George
     Orwell’s politically engaged
Tribune
contrasts with the exotic, aesthetic home of the New Romantic and Apocalypse poets,
     Tambimuttu’s
Poetry London
; the urbane
Horizon
of Cyril Connolly contrasts with James Laughlin’s modernist
New Directions
, recently founded to promote Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D. and others.
     From the memoirs and letters of the time, Roberts emerges as a kind of insider’s outsider,
     well-connected but somehow out on a limb: ‘the one and only Latino-Welsh modernist’,
     as one of her best critics, Nigel Wheale, puts it. 11 As a special interest group, a sort of ‘fusion-identity’, this is certainly an unusual
     category to fall into.
    Life at Llanybri was very different from the London literary scene. Keidrych was often
     away, and after going AWOL from the army (
Gods with Stainless Ears
obliquely refers to this in Part II where the gunner is interned and appears before
     the army board), he was transferred to the Ministry ofInformation for the last three years of the war. One of Lynette’s most painful experiences
     came in summer 1942, when the rumour began in the village that she was a spy. This
     is the subject of her poem ‘Raw Salt on Eye’:
    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.
    By 1948, the marriage with Keidrych had broken up. Lynette left Llanybri and moved
     temporarily to a caravan in Laugharne, the village that inspired Thomas’s ‘Under Milk
     Wood’. Her address, written at the bottom of several of her unpublished poems, was
     ‘The Caravan, The Graveyard, Laugharne’. The couple divorced in 1949, and she returned
     to London, where she lived in Kent Terrace NW1 and in a caravan in Bells Wood,