Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems Read online

  Throughout her time in Llanybri, Roberts kept a diary – quirky, observant, funny, but always deeply engaged in the culture of the place and its people. Characteristic of her attitude is optimism and toughness of mind, and though she has a complicated person’s tendency to idealise the simple life, she is free of the kind of pseudo-Celtic sentimentality to which she, an outsider, might easily have succumbed. After a visit by Ernest Rhys she complains of his obsession with the Celtic twilight: ‘He was still caught up in its aura when he met us, and, frankly, this nauseated me.’ Elsewhere she writes of her belief in traditional crafts, before specifying: ‘I do not mean the retention of arty crafty work of the past, but rather the modern craft that is contemporary and is required for practical use in our time.’ She describes air raids, the arrival of evacuees, the daily grind of village life and its sustaining friendships; but also uses the diary to keep track of her eclectic researches: on butterflies, cattle, wild flowers and birds; on coracles, architecture, gravestone lettering and Renaissance painters. Several of these researches culminated in essays and articles: on Renaissance painters for Life and Letters To-Day or on coracles and Welsh architecture for The Field. Whether commenting on culture and politics (‘the word tradition is really a substitute for fear’) or sketching her neighbours (‘Mrs Treharne […] lay or sat in her four-poster bed like a pickled Elizabethan’), the diary is not just a pleasure to read but an invaluable document on life on the ‘home front’. It is often poignant too, about the loneliness and quiet extremity of her existence:

  I feel chequered with energy. Full of positive red squares and black negative ones. What shall I do? One moment I feel I could draw the moon from its zenith and the next I am unbearably listless, can find nothing to interest me in this bare stone village. […] I feel cramped and barred from life. Could it be that I dislike the ties of married life, that I resent having to cook four times a day, wash up, see to the kitchen fire […]? All this when I am ‘with child’. […] Now quick again, I feel full of bubbles in the head. (7 March 1940)

  Roberts encountered Tambimuttu, Henry Treece, George Barker, Roy Campbell, Kathleen Raine and others, poets associated with the New Romantic and ‘Apocalypse’ groupings. She also knew the Anglo-Welsh poets – not just Dylan Thomas, but R.S. Thomas, Glyn Jones and Vernon Watkins. She was familiar, largely through translation, with Welsh-language poetry from the earliest literature to the work of her contemporaries, and several of her own poems experiment with the englyn, a traditional Welsh strict metre form. Roberts also read, and attended readings by, Auden, MacNeice and Day Lewis, and the influence of these poets has been underexplored – on her conception of the long poem for instance, not to mention her interest in the moving image, film and sound and mass media. Of the established modernists she knew and read Eliot and David Jones, as well as the work of poets and critics, like Laura Riding and Graves, who set themselves against modernism. Her diary, letters and autobiography contain many fine, lapidary or humorous vignettes of the literary world of the time: Cecil Day Lewis is ‘like a temperate book on a shelf’; MacNeice, ‘bastard-looking: excellent delivery of sinewy and satirical verse’; R.S. Thomas, ‘a gloomy sort of person – who like most intelligent ministers today doesn’t believe in the church that he preaches’. One of Lynette’s most effusive admirers was Edith Sitwell, with whom she corresponded for several years from the early 1940s, and to whom she dedicated Gods with Stainless Ears. Lynette’s unpublished account of a tea party with the Sitwells suggests that, despite her affection for Edith, she was not comfortable in the Sitwellian milieu. ‘Yesterday a wretched day of my life’, she begins, elaborating:

  We walked over to the cool and ornate marble piece to find spread over the whole surface Edith Sitwell. Madame Tussaud. Wax. Out of the past. Out of a picture. I was shaken more than I had expected to be. And it was over some considerable time before I could register all that I saw.10

  In 1943, Roberts began a correspondence with Robert Graves. Their letters contain a fascinating insight into the composition of The White Goddess, to which Roberts contributed material and advice on sources, and for which she is acknowledged in the foreword to the book. The previous year, in 1942, she had sent some poems to T.S. Eliot at Faber, and a few months after a manuscript of A Heroic Poem, later to become Gods with Stainless Ears. Eliot was interested, though found it ‘stiff going’ and suggested she send him a volume of short poems. He asked for the ‘Heroic Poem’ again in 1948, and it was published three years later. In the dustjacket notes to Poems, Eliot wrote:

  She has, first, an unusual gift for observation and evocation of scenery and place, whether it is in Wales or her native South America; second, a gift for verse construction, influenced by the Welsh tradition, which is evident in her freer verse as well as in stricter forms; and third, an original idiom and tone of speech.

  The acknowledgements to the book reveal the range of journals she published in: George Orwell’s politically engaged Tribune contrasts with the exotic, aesthetic home of the New Romantic and Apocalypse poets, Tambimuttu’s Poetry London; the urbane Horizon of Cyril Connolly contrasts with James Laughlin’s modernist New Directions, recently founded to promote Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D. and others. From the memoirs and letters of the time, Roberts emerges as a kind of insider’s outsider, well-connected but somehow out on a limb: ‘the one and only Latino-Welsh modernist’, as one of her best critics, Nigel Wheale, puts it.11 As a special interest group, a sort of ‘fusion-identity’, this is certainly an unusual category to fall into.

  Life at Llanybri was very different from the London literary scene. Keidrych was often away, and after going AWOL from the army (Gods with Stainless Ears obliquely refers to this in Part II where the gunner is interned and appears before the army board), he was transferred to the Ministry of Information for the last three years of the war. One of Lynette’s most painful experiences came in summer 1942, when the rumour began in the village that she was a spy. This is the subject of her poem ‘Raw Salt on Eye’:

  Hard people, I will wash up now, bake bread and hang

  Dishcloth over the weeping hedge. I can not raise

  My mind, for it has gone wandering away with him

  I shall not forget; and your ill-mannered praise.

  By 1948, the marriage with Keidrych had broken up. Lynette left Llanybri and moved temporarily to a caravan in Laugharne, the village that inspired Thomas’s ‘Under Milk Wood’. Her address, written at the bottom of several of her unpublished poems, was ‘The Caravan, The Graveyard, Laugharne’. The couple divorced in 1949, and she returned to London, where she lived in Kent Terrace NW1 and in a caravan in Bells Wood, 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 exhib
ited 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 the Mental 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 another flare, our blood distilled, cylindricals of glass. The raiders scatter, then return and form a piratic ring within our shores. High explosives splash up blue, white, and green. We know all copper compounds are poisonous, we know also where they are.

  Bleached, Rosie turns to fetch in the cows. I lonely, return to my hearth, there is a quiet clayfire with blue flames rising that would bring solace to any heart.12

  ‘I’ breezily corrects herself from first person pronoun to number, and the tone from the start is excited rather than fearful. The voices are rendered in direct speech, speech that is tender and comradely, emphasising how, beneath the impersonality of numbers, human relations continue intact (direct speech fragments in Roberts tend to be identity-emphatic, and not – as in much modernist poetry – identity-scrambling). At the end of ‘Swansea Raid’, the names return, as dust settles after an explosion. Place, people and things rebecome themselves: ‘Rosie returns to fetch the cows’; ‘I lonely’ goes back indoors; the fire is no longer the fire of flares and explosions but an intimate domestic fire. This may be a text about fracturing, scattering and dispersal; but it is also about the resumption of life, of community and social relations. It also displays the orders – elemental/ mythic (moon), artificial/technological (explosions and flares), and domestic (hearthfire) – in and between which Roberts’s poetry as a whole moves. Central too to its conception is the interplay of axes: we have the vertical, the defining axis of lyric poetry (images of verticality such as assumption, descent, flight, geological drilling abound throughout Roberts’s work, along with intimations of moral uplift, freefall, abjection and dejection); then the horizontal, the vector of a more ‘naturalist’, observational approach. It is also perhaps the axis of historical time (whether imagined as linear or elliptical), of myth and of futuristic anticipation. And like much of Roberts’s poetry, however stylised, oblique or encrypted, it is set in a real place, in the midst of a real event, among real people.13

  ‘Swansea Raid’ also reveals Roberts’s characteristic verbal association and linguistic play: ‘pass out’ sounds military, while ‘glade of magnesium’ sets off the natural world against the scientific, a frequent device in her work. The flares are like ‘orange bees’, but this is no ‘bee-loud glade’, though the planes’ menacing thrum stands in eerie consonance with the Yeatsian image of repose. There is even bilingual wordplay: in ‘Jerries burden the sky’ the plane’s heavy buzzing is expressed through an anglicised echo of the French verb, bourdonner, to buzz, in turn taken up by the word ‘drone’. Ready-made phrases or images are given a twist, diverted into something curious, jolting or sinister such as the text-fragment, seen in a flash, advertising ‘Cow Cakes’ and ‘read around her hips’. Like the rest of Roberts’s poetry, ‘Swansea Raid’ is lexically omnivorous: painterly, technical, dramatic, full of strange words and shiny magpie diction, the glittering new language of technological knowhow is spliced with the language of the farm. Among Roberts’s key words, appropriately enough, are ‘alloy’ and ‘compound’, useful words to bear in mind when confronted with her use of language and treatment of subject.

  Poems is grounded in a variety places: West Wales, South America, London. Roberts ranges freely over myth and history (whether Welsh, Greek or Incan), drawing them back to the domestic and the private. In her work, we are as likely to encounter railroads and air raids as milking pails and dishcloths drying on hedges, submerged Incan temples as Cow and Gate lorries. Characters from Homer or the Mabinogi exist in the same poems, and in the same imaginative continuum, as cow cakes and Marie Stopes. There are semi-mythical places and science-fictional locations, archaisms jostle with technical locutions, pastoral comes up against the futuristic. There are moments of vatic arousal and romantic nationalism, epigraphs in Welsh, references to Maeterlinck and Hokusai alongside the Dogs of Annwn, Aertex clothing and Singer sewing machines. There is never the same poem twice, and her range – public, private, intimate, free and tightly formal – is remarkably broad. Some of her alleged obscurity, and much of her oblique or inverted syntax, is down to her tendency to transcribe, unaltered, the idioms and phrases she hears all around her. While many of her phrases seem cryptic, elliptical or contorted, many are simply unmediated, direct speech. Her fascination, on the one hand, with dialect (even if it is an idealised version of the ‘language of the soil’) and, on the other, with the rarefied or specialist lexicons of science or botany or art history, seem of a piece with modernistic attempts to bypass the linguistic middle-ground. Roberts’s tone is by turns hieratic, ceremonial, matter-of-fact and immediate. Often it is all at once. Even her poem-titles are mysterious and compelling: ‘Raw Salt on Eye’, ‘Ecliptic Blue’, ‘Fifth of the Strata’, ‘Xaquixaguana’.

  Lynette Roberts is in an obvious and precise sense a war poet. Her poetry describes bereavement, privation and loss, the brokenness and fracturing of experience both for the combatants and for those left at home. But she is also a poet of the hearth, of community, of continuity and survival. She does not idealise the domestic world: it is extreme, heartbreaking, cruel, and perhaps her greatest achievement in Poems is the conviction with which she describes women’s life in wartime. Troubled scenes of domesticity recur in her work, and the depth of contentment depicted in ‘Poem from Llanybri’ is not typical. Roberts is uniquely able to express the way modern war is reflected and refracted, projected and screened or watched from afar. And as in ‘Swansea Raid’, it is also in constant danger of being turned into something spectacular. Her poems often register the liminal moments when danger tips into spectacle and spectacle into danger. In ‘Earthbound’ the poem’s speaker describes sitting at her make-up table and hearing of the death of a local boy:

 
I, in my dressing gown,

  At the dressing table with mirror in hand

  Suggest my lips with accustomed air, see

  The reflected van like lipstick enter the village

  When Laura came, and asked me if I knew […]

  The preoccupation with reflections is characteristic of Roberts’s subject as well as her imagery, from the handmirror at the dressing-table to the ‘Sun splintered on waves’ of Part I of Gods with Stainless Ears. The home front is not a refuge so much as a screen onto which the drama of war is projected and scattered, real but estranged, intangible but touching all aspects of life. Hence perhaps her poetry’s insistence on images of reflections and refractions, of film, news broadcasts and sound recording. In this context we may think of Keith Douglas’s poem ‘How to Kill’, in which the poem’s speaker sights the enemy soldier ‘in the dial of my glass’. He gives the order to fire: ‘Being damned, I am amused/ to see the centre of love diffused/ and the waves of love travel into vacancy’.14 ‘How to Kill’ is built around metaphors of distance: the technology of death ensures one can kill from far away, just as the ‘damned’ speaker is emotionally distanced from his own action. It is real and unreal: the glass brings the image closer but keeps its reality at bay, while the words ‘diffusion’ and ‘waves’ (Douglas was surely evoking the language of radio and cinema broadcasting here), insist on war experience, even for the combatant, as something projected, technologically mediated and disembodied. There is a marked insistence on such images in Roberts’s poetry too. ‘Catoptric’ (produced by or relating to mirrors or reflections) is one of her many unusual words, and her poems abound in images of glass, prisms, shiny metals and alloys, water, ice, mirrors and polished surfaces. In his review of Keith Tuma’s Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry, the poet John Wilkinson discusses Roberts as an example of what he calls ‘frostwork’: ‘window glass which is semi-opaque through its decoration; that is, poets whose writing exhibits a sustained balance between linguistic surface and reference to an internal or external world’.15 For Wilkinson, Roberts is a test case in the perennial debate: between poets who write as if language were the clear pane that renders the world as it is, and those for whom language not only alters what we see, but is a part of it, needing itself to be rendered.