Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems Read Free Page B

Hertfordshire,
     close to where the children went to boarding school. Since
Poems
and
Gods with Stainless Ears
, she had put together another full collection , and continued to publish in magazines and journals. The manuscript for
The Fifth Pillar of Song
, containing eighty-odd pages of new poems (and several earlier ones excluded from
Poems
), was sent to Eliot in 1951. It was turned down two years later. Between 1950 and
     1952 Lynette continued to give poetry readings (her bibliography lists readings at
     the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Oxford University Poetry Society) and took
     part in radio programmes on the Welsh Regional Service and the Third Programme. Poems
     continued to appear in journals –
Poetry
(Chicago),
Poetry
(London),
The Listener
– until 1953, but by now her career as a poet had effectively ended. In December
     1952, a verse play, ‘O Lovers of Death’, was broadcast (neither script nor recording
     survives) on the Welsh Regional Service. In February 1953
El Dorado
, a ‘radio ballad’ about Welsh colonists in Patagonia, was broadcast on the Third
     Programme and repeated twice. Other projects – anthologies, editions, essays – came
     to nothing. In 1954 she published her last book,
The Endeavour
, a novel about Captain Cook’s expedition.
    In 1955–6 Roberts set up the Chislehurst Caves art project in Kent, which ended after
     an accident in which a cave ceiling collapsed and seriously injured the sculptor Peter Danziger. The paintings exhibited on the cave walls were
     by the Guyanese artist Denis Williams. In 1956, and partly as a result of the project’s
     failure, Roberts had a mental breakdown, and in the same year her sister Win bought
     her a house near Chislehurst. It was the first home of her own. Later that year, while
     still recovering, Roberts became a Jehovah’s Witness, and remained one for the rest
     of her life. In 1970 she returned to Llanybri, moving into a cottage in Spring Gardens.
     Suffering from schizophrenia, she was committed four times under theMental Health Act to St David’s Hospital, Carmarthen. After her first stay in hospital,
     she moved to Carmarthen, and then in 1989 to Towy Haven residential home in Ferryside,
     overlooking Llansteffan on the other side of the bay. In December 1994 she fell and
     broke her hip while dancing, and later had a heart attack in hospital. She died of
     heart failure on 26 September at Towy Haven, and was buried in Llanybri churchyard.
III
    One way into Lynette Roberts’ work is ‘Swansea Raid’. It appeared first in
Life and Letters To-Day
in 1941 (as ‘From a New Perception of Colour’, subtitled ‘And I shall take as my
     Example the Raid on Swansea) and was reprinted with some differences in
Village Dialect
:
    I, that is Xebo7011 pass out into the chill-blue air and join Xebn559162 her sack
     apron greening by the light of the moon. I read around her hips: ‘ BEST CWT: CLARK’S COW-CAKES, H.T .5.’ I do not laugh because I love my peasant friend. The night is clear, spacious,
     a himmel blue, and the stars minute pinpricks. The elbow-drone of jerries burden the
     sky and our sailing planes tack in and out with their fine metallic hum.
    Oh! look how lovely she is caught in those lights! Oh!
    From our high village on the Towy we can see straight down the South Wales Coast.
     Every searchlight goes up, a glade of magnesium waning to a distant hill which we
     know to be Swansea.
    Swansea’s sure to be bad; look at those flares like a swarm of orange bees.
    They fade and others return. A collyrium sky, chemically washed Cu DH2. A blasting
     flash impels Swansea to riot! higher, absurdly higher, the sulphuric clouds roll with
     their stench of ore, we breathe naphthalene air, the pillars of smoke writhe and the astringent sky lies pale at her sides. A
     Jerry overhead drops two flares; the cows returning to their sheds wear hides of cyanite
     blue, their eyes GLINTING OPALS ! We, alarmed, stand puce beneath