A collection of poetry by the poet Lynette Roberts born into a Welsh family in Buenos Aires. This compilation of her work has been edited y Patrick McGuinness and features an introduction to the poet written by Angharad Rhys. Featuring poems from previously published collections, the book also has previously unpublished poems. This edition includes an index of first lines.

Casgliad o waith y bardd o Buenos Aires, Lynette Roberts, un sydd â chefndir Cymreig. Mae'r cyhoeddiad hwn wedi'i olygu gan Patrick McGuinness ac yn cynnwys cyflwyniad i'r bardd gan Angharad Rhys. Mae'r casgliad yn cynnwys cerddi o'r casgliadau Poems (1944), Gods With Stainless Ears - A Heroic Poem (1951) yn ogystal â cherddi heb eu cyhoeddi o'r blaen.

In the nineteen-forties, Lynette Roberts was admired and acclaimed by Robert Graves, T.S. Eliot and Edith Sitwell. They clearly regarded her as exotic and daring, both in her personal life and in her work. She was born in Buenos Aires in 1909, into a family with Welsh roots, but as a young woman moved to London and later to the village of Llanybri, the subject of her best-known poem.

Patrick McGuinness and Carcanet are to be congratulated for making available her entire poetic output, by which I mean the contents of her two collections Poems and Gods with stainless years. I have a preference for the poems produced during the earlier period, which are clear and direct. The poems which make up the second of these collections offer a stark contrast and are complex, challenging and enigmatic. But I also have to add that all the work in the Collected Poems is the work of a quite exceptional human being.

McGuinness’s introduction conveys much relevant biographical information as well as summing up Roberts’s importance in the British literary scene in the 'forties. Two welcome items of prose by Roberts are also included, a radio talk on her South American poems and an article published in a Welsh literary journal in 1945 on Patagonia. A few previously unpublished poems also appear.

After fifty years a new readership can read the work of Lynette Roberts in its totality. According to her daughter, Angharad Rhys, writing in her preface, she would have been delighted to see her work in print again. “She always knew her worth,” she adds.

Dewi Roberts

It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgement should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.

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