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Collected Poems

Lynette Roberts

Edited by Patrick McGuinness

Cover Picture of Collected Poems
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Categories: 20th Century, Welsh, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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(Pub. May 2013)
9781847775641
£12.95 £11.65
Paperback (220 pages)
(Pub. Nov 2005)
9781857548426
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  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Contents
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Past Syrian Juniper and tall grass;
    Hanging with dark secrets the Brewer's spruce;
    The pond that drew the young child in;
    Among darkening leaves: a nightingale
    Sobbing in the sunniest season,
    'My love, my Love, why do I love another?'

    To the green wood where I found my love;
    To the green wood where I held my love;
    To the green wood now my love is gone.

    From 'These Words I Write on Crinkled Tin'

    The work of an original, haunting and experimental woman modernist poet is made available again, for the first in 50 years. Lynette Roberts is principally a war poet, in that her two published collections take as their subject a woman's life in wartime. But she is also, or therefore, a love poet and a poet of the hearth. A late-modernist, she works on two scales at the same time: the mythic and the domestic.

    Those poets and readers who have valued Roberts' work have been experimentalists. Even at this distance, she challenges and instructs, at the level of diction, syntax and achieved form. She relentlessly opens out the language of poetry, she is free with extremes of subject, scale and conception, and her work has flourished in its very marginality. Now, with republication, she is restored as an extraordinary poet in the development of twentieth century British poetry. As a Welsh writer, her best work stands alongside that of her near-contemporaries, David Jones, R.S. Thomas and Dylan Thomas. As a woman poet, her work bears comparison with that of both Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes.
    Preface by Angharad Rhys
    Introduction by Patrick McGuinness

    Poems (1944)
    Poem from Llanybri
    The Shadow Remains
    Plasnewydd
    Low Tide
    Raw Salt on Eye
    The Circle of C
    Lamentation
    Broken Voices
    Earthbound
    Spring
    Rhode Island Red
    Ecliptic Blue
    Poem [We must uprise O my people.]
    Woodpecker
    Curlew
    Moorhen
    Seagulls
    Fifth of the Strata
    Thursday September the Tenth
    House of Commons
    Crossed and Uncrossed
    The Seasons
    Orarium
    In Sickness and in Health
    Blood and Scarlet Thorns
    Rainshiver
    Royal Mail
    The New World
    Argentine Railways
    Xaquixaguana
    River Plate
    Canzone Benedicto
    Cwmcelyn
    Notes on Legend and Form

    Gods with Stainless Ears. A Heroic Poem (1951)
    Preface
    Part I
    Part II
    Part III
    Part IV
    Part V

    Notes

    Uncollected and Unpublished Poems
    To a Welsh Woman
    Song of Praise
    Poem [In steel white land]
    Englyn
    Green Madrigal [I]
    Transgression
    The Hypnotist (Welsh Englyn)
    Love is an Outlaw
    These Words I Write on Crinkled Tin
    Two Wine Glasses
    Ty Gwyn
    The 'Pele' Fetched in
    A Shot Rabbit
    Llanstephan Madrigal
    Displaced Persons
    Saint Swithin's Pool
    Brazilian Blue
    It Was Not Easy
    Chapel Wrath
    Trials and Tirades
    Angharad
    Prydein
    Out of a Sixth Sense
    Green Madrigal [II]
    Premonition
    Mockery
    Red Mullet
    The Tavern
    The Temple Road
    The Grebe
    He alone could get me out of this
    The Fifth Pillar of Song
    Bruska's Song
    Pendine
    Release
    Downbeat

    Appendix
    Radio Talk on South American Poems
    El Dorado (1953)
    Patagonia (article published in Wales, V, 7, Summer 1945)

    Notes
    Index of First Lines
    Lynette Roberts
    Lynette Roberts was born in Buenos Aires of Welsh stock in 1909 and died in West Wales in 1995. She published two collections of poems in her lifetime, both from Faber and Faber: Poems (1944) and Gods with Stainless Ears . She married the Welsh writer and editor Keidrych Rhys, and ... read more
    Patrick McGuinness
    Patrick McGuinness was born in 1968 in Tunisia. In 1998 he won an Eric Gregory Award for poetry from the Society of Authors and his work has appeared in the Independent, PN Review, Poetry Wales, Leviathan and other journals and magazines, as well as the anthology New Poetries ... read more
    Awards won by Patrick McGuinness Long-listed, 2011 Wales Book of the Year, English Language Category in The Western Mail (Jilted City)
    'There is a huge amount to savor, learn from and enjoy here. Anyone with pretensions to know British writing of the 1940s should read it.'
    Paul St John Mackintosh, TeleRead
    Praise for Patrick McGuinness 'When T.E. Hulme was killed in Flanders in 1917, he was known to a few people as a brilliant talker, a brilliant amateur of metaphysics, and the author of two or three of the most beautiful poems in the English language... he appears as the forerunner of a new attitude of mind...'
    T.S. Eliot, The Criterion, 1924
    'Patrick McGuinness has constructed a rough guide to a lonely planet, full of unquenchable cultural curiosity and irresistible ironies... Alive to every undulation of the linguistic landscapes in which he moves, McGuinness’s poems often pivot on the cross-cultural possibilities of a single isolated word.'
    New Welsh Review
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