| Two persistent themes run through this unique anthology. One is Welshness, the other compassion. |
| This is only proper. The purpose of the book is to support the institution of kindness called Shelter; its contributors are a wide range of Welsh people, or people linked with Wales, to nearly all of whom some feeling of Cymreictod (Welshness), is essential to existence, and is more or less co-terminous with the idea of poetry. The world, of course, loves to call Wales 'The Land of Song', when it is not indulging in some less flattering epithet, and is generally thinking of male-voice choirs, rugby crowds and the tremulous parlour tenors of our grandparents' day, with Geraint Evans and Bryn Terfel thrown in for politeness's sake. The true Welsh song, though, from medieval times to the present day, has been poetry, and especially perhaps lyric poetry of the kind which, in the Welsh way, not only wears its heart on its sleeve but is inclined to be laughing up it, too. |
| Not all the poems in this book are by Welsh poets, but most of them fit these criteria anyway. They are kind, they are melodious, they are disrespectful, they are often funny in a sly and self-deprecatory way they have the very qualities, in short, which characterize the greatest of all our poets, Dafydd ap Gwilym himself. Even the holiest of them (and though the collection is nothing if not ecumenical, still a good many are Christian poems) are alive with paradox and familiarity: if George Herbert likens his Lord and Saviour to the perfect host at a dinner table, Saunders Lewis addresses the Good Thief as a brother and an intermediary. It is a friendly assembly of literature: nothing pompous about it, nothing hectoring. The most eminent of its academic contributors explain their choices most amiably not always a characteristic of eminent academics. |
| When the collection first reached me, in typescript, I was astonished by the full-blooded scope of it. Anthologies are more usually restrained. Honest bawdy is the one category of poetry missing from this book (surprising in a Welsh selection, but perhaps the contributors were inhibited by the work's high-minded intent). Otherwise, almost everything is here: poems haunting and poems provocative, poems old and new, poems of childhood and of maturity, poems of love and poems if not of hate exactly, at least of mockery. There are a few poems that might be regarded by critics of |
|
