Poetry 1900-2000: One Hundred Poets From Wales | Date: 28 April 2011, 07:34
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Poetry 1900-2000: One Hundred Poets From Wales (Library of Wales)
By Meic Stephens
* Publisher: Parthian Books
* Number Of Pages: 877
* Publication Date: 2008-10-07
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 1902638883
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9781902638881
Product Description:
This anthology, the largest of its kind ever compiled, presents the work of Welsh poets writing in English during the 20th Century. All the major names are included - DAVID JONES, IDRIS DAVIES, VERNON WATKINS, R. S. THOMAS, DYLAN THOMAS and ALUN LEWIS - as well as many living writers like DANNIE ABSE, TONY CONRAN, GILLIAN CLARKE,TONY CURTIS, ROBERT MINHINNICK and GWYNETH LEWIS. Every decade of the century is featured, as is almost every part of Wales - urban, industrial and rural - and many of the poems reflect our history.
Poetry 1900-2000 by Meic Stephens (editor) reviewed by John Idris Jones
Poetry 1900-2000
One hundred poets from Wales
edited by Meic Stephens
PARTHIAN ISBN 978 1 902638 ?12.99
This is certainly a remarkable book, 875 pages long. 100 poets, some 600 poems in all. If you are going on holiday to some boring place like Lanzarote or Malta, take it with you. It would be good to read each poem, preferably aloud, against some unsuitable background.
It's a fine production. I send my congratulations to the factory which produced it, Gomer, in Llandysul, especially the type-setter and whoever was responsible for the binding. You could throw this book against your garage wall and it would still be in one piece: it's 42mm thick!
But of course, principally, this is a tribute to Meic Stephens. Nobody else could have edited it up to this standard. His work here has been outstanding. What is so fundamentally impressive is the high-level intellect, the sheer grinding scholarship, that he has brought to this text. Both on the side of fact-stating, bibliography and biography and on the side of critical comments on the poet's work, which are generally swift, unobtrusive and accurate. In future, when students are looking for the details of a Welsh writer's life and work, they will look in to this volume for correct information. Meic Stephens, with his huge knowledge of Welsh writers, has done this editing so well - fairly, sensitively and comprehensively.
It may be that 100 poets is too-large a number; that perhaps he has been too generous with the selection of verse from those born after 1950. On the other hand, genuine poets such as Deryn Rees-Jones and - the last in the book- Owen Sheers well deserve their place.
Going back to the beginning, it is interesting how the tone and syntax of W.H.Davies (the first in the book), A.G.Prys-Jones, Wyn Griffith and Eiluned Lewis are very much of the twentieth century; and how the work of Idris Davies is so clearly biographical and social, without sentiment or cliche. R.S.Thomas, born 1913, the year before Dylan, is represented mainly by his earlier work, and his selection finishes with the superb 'A Marriage': "We met/ under a shower/ of bird-notes./ Fifty years passed,.../ She was young;/ I kissed with my eyes/ closed and opened/ them on her wrinkles.." Ah, what style, what poise; over forty years of practise at verse-writing went into that poem. And Dylan, is of course, impeccably repesented, including the rhetoric of 'Ceremony After a Fire Raid' and the superby economic and resonant 'In My Craft or Sullen Art'.
Leslie Norris's work is impressive. His handling of language is deft and ambitious. His 'Autumn Elegy' is as fine a poem as you'll find anywhere: "..I am not accustomed to such opulent/ Panoply of dying..But that I remember again what/ Young men of my own time died/ In the Spring of their living..They died in their flames..Now as the trees burn..." And I much liked his 'Peaches' and 'His Father, Singing'. These in a way set the standard for the whole book.
Herbert Williams, rightly, has eight poems; beautifully written, his plain diction and steady voice coming over clearly. Sally Roberts Jones, in 'Palm Sunday' and 'Community' re-creates place, time and mood. I am pleased that Meic Stephens included three of his own poems. 'Ponies Twynyrodyn' deservs its place in any anthology, the writing capturing the physical realities; and 'Hooters' re-creating the world of the boy in the valley village standing at the window hearing the pit hooters: "We now live in this city:..I sleep easily, but waking tonight/ found the same desolate clangour in my ears/ that from an old and sunken level/ used to chill me as a boy..."
I hope that the above is enough to assert that there is very substantial work in this book.
On page 153, the Editor writes: " [there is a ] tension between English-speaking Swansea and Welsh-speaking West Wales.." This comment, modified, can be applied to the book as a whole. In the first half, there is a sense of the Welsh-speaking world, mostly South Wales. It permeates the English text, creating tones, rhythms, tempos which belong in the work of dozens of Wales's English-language poets born, say, before 1945. Then, it gradually dies away, as the language loses its place in the community, fostered through chapel and school. At the same time, particularly in the coal valleys of south Wales, the economy changes as the pits close; the communities begin to lose their spirit of harmony and other-directedness. The economy and culture of the money-society starts to dominate. The writers who come later in this volume have less of the effect of the Welsh language in their work. And they do not transmit, sometimes unknowingly, that sense of a shifting of the tectonic plates of society; that influence upon writing is benign; it makes for better verse: more focus; necessity, conviction; more intensity; more meaning. Only through an anthology of this range and depth, covering a century of writing, can one see how the styles and substances change.
Congratulations to Meic Stephens on a job very well done.
Roundyhouse Magazine, February 1, 2008
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