Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems Read online

  Lynette Roberts c. 1940.

  Photograph reproduced by kind permission of Angharad and Prydein Rhys.

  LYNETTE ROBERTS

  Collected Poems

  Edited by Patrick McGuinness

  Contents

  Title Page

  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  Uncollected and Unpublished Poems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

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Preface

  Everyone who knew my mother, Lynette Roberts, remembers the same qualities in her: she was warm, loving, positive, incredibly generous, open-minded and unconventional, and had a great sense of fun and mischief. They remember her curiosity and powers of observation, her love of dancing, her energy and zest for life.

  Because she was in and out of mental hospitals for the last twenty-five years of her life and lost touch with many friends, it was good for me to hear their stories. For example, the painter and writer Celia Buckmaster, who had been one of her bridesmaids, and helped Lynette with her flower arranging business, told me how one day Lynette decided they needed a holiday. Lynette looked through the atlas and was attracted to Madeira. On research it turned out Madeira was the only place where the Bristle Footed Worm remained – that, of course, intrigued her so off they went, travelling cargo. Lynette found a small house high up the hill and a woman called Angelina to work for them. It was during those long days of freedom that Lynette found her vocation as a poet. She sent a telegram to London announcing ‘Have found my voice at last’.

  The painter Sheila Healey knew Lynette in Buenos Aires and London. ‘Lynette was very warm and kind,’ she told me. ‘She befriended people and gave them courage. Her flat in Charlotte Street was completely original – she did amazing things with colour. She opened the door to colour to me when we looked at Indian miniatures in the V&A. I also think of her as very enthusiastic. When she was interested in something she studied it intensely.’

  Lynette always longed for a simple home, with a fire and a table – a place to look after friends in need – but much of her life was unsettled and nomadic, in rented rooms and a caravan. When she left my father, our address became The Caravan, The Graveyard, Laugharne. Later in Bells Wood, Hertfordshire, we spent a whole summer catching butterflies and dragonflies, draping muslin round the caravan to keep them captive so we could draw them. The caravan’s final resting place was Chislehurst Caves, where Lynette tried to set up an underground art gallery. While we were there she bought me and my brother Prydein an old gypsy caravan which we painted red and yellow.

  Eventually her lovely sister Win bought us a house. Here Lynette grew old-fashioned roses and pinks, checking which had the best scent and finding out their history – reference books were always covered with her notes and sketches. She made spaghetti and hung it on the clothes airer to dry. Our red wine glasses had been bought with her Derby winnings: at 33-1 the odds weren’t good but she loved the name Never Say Die – a motto she always quoted. She was almost always broke, owing money all round: one morning a cheque arrived and that evening we were on the boat train to Paris.

  While she was dying, in rural Wales, she kept reverting to Spanish – though not her first language it was the language of her childhood. At one point we needed a dictionary to understand her. Then we read her poems and she was happy. She’d have been delighted to see her work published again, but she wouldn’t have been surprised. She always knew her own worth.

  Angharad Rhys

  2005

  Introduction

  I

  The Argentine-born Welsh writer Lynette Roberts published two books of poems as dramatic, varied, dense, elliptical and inset with verbal novelty as any experimental poetry in the twentieth century. T.S. Eliot, her friend and editor at Faber, praised her work, complimenting it by that most Eliotic of criteria: that it communicated before it made sense. Roberts Graves, who drew on her expertise as he researched for The White Goddess, wrote: ‘Lynette Roberts is one of the few true poets now writing. Her best is the best.’ Dylan Thomas was best man at her wedding, Wyndham Lewis drew her portrait, and she was for a while on the peripheries of bohemian London. Her first collection, Poems, appeared in 1944, when she was thirty-five. The second, Gods with Stainless Ears, subtitled ‘A Heroic Poem’, came out in 1951. By her mid-forties she had stopped writing, had a severe mental breakdown, and become a Jehovah’s Witness. She took no further interest in her work or literary reputation. By the time of her death, aged eighty-six in 1995, only a few people had heard of her. Her poetry, out of print for nearly half a century, was unknown beyond a small circle of poets and critics resourceful or privileged enough to lay hold of first and only editions of her books.1 Her prose, including a war diary, an autobiography and uncollected or unpublished articles and memoirs, was forgotten.

  The opening of Poems, ‘Poem from Llanybri’, is a welcome-poem to soldier and fellow-poet Alun Lewis:

  If you come my way that is…

  Between now and then, I wil
l offer you

  A fist full of rock cress fresh from the bank

  The valley tips of garlic red with dew

  Cooler than shallots, a breath you can swank

  In the village when you come. At noon-day

  I will offer you a choice bowl of cawl

  Served with a ‘lover’s’ spoon and a chopped spray

  of leeks or savori fach, not used now,

  In the old way you’ll understand. […]

  A portal to the book, it imagines the poetic encounter as a hospitality extended and a hospitality repaid. This is poetry as dialogue, poetry as rooted tradition: a celebration of community, both in the village, here described for its uniqueness, and within the circle of poets. It takes pleasure in the Welsh words and phrases – ‘cawl’, ‘savori fach’ and place names such as ‘Cwmcelyn’ – but also in the Welsh speech-patterns that make their way into English: if you come my way that is…. ‘Poem from Llanybri’ celebrates poetry both as living language and as heightened, ceremonial language. It is fresh, direct, seemingly artless in its tone; but even as it is powered by future verbs, it is reaching back, to the ‘old ways’, the old customs. It asserts continuity of tradition, speech and community: ‘Can you come? – send an ode or elegy/ In the old way and raise our heritage’.2 That small word, ‘our’, is revealing too: Roberts was born in Argentina, educated at art school in London, and had been in Wales, married to a Welshman, less than two years. Though her parents’ families, Australian for generations, had originally come from Wales, she was Welsh by a combination of choice and imaginative will. ‘Poem from Llanybri’ is a cosmopolitan’s claim to a rooted culture that is also a culture of rootedness.

  The originality and compressed variety of Poems emerges when we compare ‘Poem from Llanybri’ with the last poem in the book, ‘Cwmcelyn’. It opens with an extract in Welsh, from the Book of Revelation, in Bishop Morgan’s 1588 Welsh Bible. The English comes in the notes at the back of Poems, which are grandly titled ‘Notes on Legend and Form’. By the time of Gods with Stainless Ears, the notes will occupy fourteen pages of translations and explanatory, scholarly and polemical elucidations (directly useful, as well as providing an intertextual forcefield beyond the poem). There then follows this, which surely reads as freshly and surprisingly now as when the 1944 reader first laid eyes on it:

  Air white with cold. Cycloid wind prevails.

  On ichnolithic plain where no print runs

  And winter hardens into plates of ice;

  Shoots an anthracite glitter of death

  From their eyes – these men shine darkly.

  When it appeared seven years later as the last section of Gods with Stainless Ears (and the 1951 reader will have been a very different kind of reader), ‘Cwmcelyn’ is the culmination of a narrative at once mythic and futuristic, a poem as different from ‘Poem from Llanybri’ as could be written by the same author. The contrast – between a poem that goes out to meet its reader and invites them into a recognisable, though gently idealised landscape and community, and ‘Cwmcelyn’, an apparently high modernist barrage of linguistic special effects, exotic referentiality and futuristic drama – is between the ‘modernist’ and the ‘traditional’, the ‘elitist’ and the ‘democratic’, the ‘obscure’ and the ‘accessible’. With Lynette Roberts, the two can be found between the covers of one slim first collection.

  II

  Lynette Roberts was born on 4 July 1909 in Buenos Aires. Her father, Cecil Arthur Roberts, came from Welsh-descended family, originally from Ruthin, north-east Wales. Cecil had gone to Argentina from Australia, where his family had lived since 1840, after training as a railway engineer. He became head of Western Railways in Argentina (one of Lynette Roberts’s poems, ‘Argentine Railways’ is about his work), and a prominent member of the expatriate community. The family lived comfortably, owning yachts and racehorses, though Dylan Thomas’s initial belief that Lynette had ‘rich Welsh parents in South America (oil-diving or train-wrecking)’3, was inaccurate. By the time she settled in Britain, Roberts was far from wealthy – she was no Nancy Cunard or Edith Sitwell, and her poetry bears little comparison with that parallel tradition we could call ‘heiress modernism’. Lynette’s mother, Ruby Garbutt, was also of Welsh origin – her family had come from Pembrokeshire. Lynette had two sisters, Winifred and Rosemary, and a brother, Dymock. Dymock was sent to school at Winchester, but after a mental breakdown was in a mental institution in Salisbury from the age of sixteen. In Gods with Stainless Ears the poem’s speaker poignantly remembers ‘my brother./ His Cathedral mind in Bedlam’.

  Lynette Roberts first came to London with her parents during the First World War, in which her father fought and was wounded, before returning to Argentina, where she and her sisters attended convent school. On 3 July 1923, the day before Lynette’s fourteenth birthday, her mother died of typhoid. In an unpublished talk on her South American poems, Lynette wrote that her mother had become fatally ill after drinking water from a contaminated well. Soon after this, the girls were sent to Bournemouth for their schooling. Cecil Roberts later remarried his childhood sweetheart Nora Sloan, who left her husband in Scotland and obtained a divorce in Uruguay to be free to marry him. In the 1930s, Lynette moved to London to study at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. During this period she roomed in Museum Street and Newman Street, in Fitzrovia. With her friend Celia Buckmaster, she travelled to Madeira; later, soon before the outbreak of war, she travelled to Hungary and Germany with another friend from Argentina, Kathleen Bellamy, who wrote reports for the Argentine newspaper La Nacion which Lynette illustrated. Roberts trained to be a florist with Constance Spry, and set up a flower arranging business called Bruska. She was for a while engaged to Merlin Minshall, intelligence officer, amateur racing driver and the man often claimed to have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s James Bond (Minshall worked for Fleming, and published his autobiography, Guilt-Edged, in 1977). Roberts broke off the engagement when she met her future husband, the Welsh writer and editor, Keidrych Rhys, whom she encountered at a Poetry London event in London in 1939 organised by Tambimuttu, the magazine’s influential editor. Rhys, Lynette recalled in her autobiography, ‘was charming and spoke like a prince’. Dylan Thomas remembered Lynette as ‘A curious girl, a poet, as they say, in her own right […] with all the symptoms of hysteria’.4 Alun Lewis was less snide: writing to his parents he described ‘a queer girl, very gifted, [who] wears a red cloak and is unaccountable.’5 Rhys was the flamboyant and resourceful editor of Wales, a journal of poetry and criticism that led a hand-to-mouth existence belied by the stature of its contributors and the energy of its promotion. He published a book of poems, The Van Pool and Other Poems, in 1942, and edited Poems from the Forces in 1941; More Poems from the Forces came two years later, followed by Modern Welsh Poetry (Faber,1944). Modern Welsh Poetry is a landmark in Welsh writing in English, containing work by Dylan Thomas, Vernon Watkins, Emyr Humphries, David Jones, Idris Davies, R.S. Thomas and others. Rhys also founded the short-lived Druid Press, which published R.S. Thomas’s first book, The Stones of the Field in 1946. Born to a Welsh-speaking farming family near Llangadog in Carmarthenshire in 1913, and christened William Ronald Rees Jones, he had legally adopted the name ‘Keidrych’ in 1940, calling himself after a stream that ran near his home. In one of his poems, the grandly titled ‘The Prodigal Speaks’, Rhys dramatised himself as follows:

  Yes born on Boxing Day among the childlike virgin hills

  […]

  Middle of war; hamlet called Bethlehem; one shop; chapel.

  Almost a second Christ! say; only son of a tenant—

  Farmer of hundred odd acres growing corn for red soldiers

  Merrily with a daft boy from an industrial school who

  Spoke in a strange tongue across our great Silurian arc of sky.6

  Lynette may have had this poem in mind when, in Part V of Gods with Stainless Ears, she evoked the soldier-hero, based on an idealised Keidrych, as ‘He, of Bethlehem treadi
ng a campaign/ Of clouds, the fleecy cade purring at his side’ (the word ‘cade’ meaning the holy Lamb).

  The couple married in Llansteffan (the English version of the name is Llanstephan), a village on the Tywi estuary, on 4 October 1939. Keidrych’s parents disapproved of the marriage, and made no secret of it. Dylan Thomas, his best man, mischievously described the wedding to Vernon Watkins as ‘distinguished mostly by the beauty of the female attendants, the brown suit of the best man [Thomas had borrowed it from Watkins], the savage displeasure of Keidrych’s mother, & Keidrych’s own extremely hangdog look & red-rimmed eyes’.7 Lynette’s bridesmaids were Kathleen Bellamy and Celia Buckmaster. Keidrych and Lynette rented a cottage in the village of Llanybri, a few miles from Llansteffan, where they lived, with frequent visits to London, throughout the war. After a miscarriage in March 1940, Lynette gave birth to two children: Angharad, in May 1945 and Prydein, in November 1946. In July 1940, Keidrych was called up to work on coastal defences, and his tours of duty included postings to the Orkneys, Yarmouth and Dover.

  It was in Llanybri that Lynette Roberts produced her most original and characteristic work: as well as her two books of poetry, she wrote a novel called Nesta which was never published and must now be considered lost. We know from her letters to Graves that the book was set in medieval Wales (Roberts referred to it in her bibliography as ‘A Historical Novel on Welsh Medieval History’) and that it was ‘modernistic’ in punctuation and narrative treatment. Graves called it a ‘work of genius in its wild way’, but disapproved of its disregard for historical accuracy, its experimentalism, and its anachronisms. Nesta, or Nêst in Welsh, was the grandmother of Gerald of Wales and daughter of Rhys ap Tewdr, the last independent prince of South Wales. Known as the ‘Helen of Wales’, she had many lovers, and several children from different fathers, including Henry I of England. In 1108 she was kidnapped by Owain ap Cadwgan of Cardigan, and the incident started a war.8 Judging from Graves’s letters, he found Roberts’s notion of a ‘historical novel’ very different from his own: ‘Lynette is always breaking in with “hoodoo”, “frou-frou”, “aluminium”, “Knossos”, S. America, modern painters & so on’, he complained. Eliot, who considered the book for Faber, described it as ‘a quite extraordinary affair’ in a letter of 11 April 1945. Roberts also published, in 1944 with Keidrych’s Druid Press, a pamphlet called Village Dialect, containing stories and an article on country dialect, in which she ranges over a variety of material (from Elizabethan English to Pierre Loti’s Pêcheur d’Islande via Joyce’s Finnegans Wake), and claims to have ‘arrived at the essence of all languages of the soil’.9