What brings you here so late? is a single autobiographical poem by one of Wales’ leading writers, an ironic quest-epic divided into four symphonic movements. .

Originally, Tony Conran shaped his poem around a fortune-telling pack of cards, hence the subtitle: ‘Tarot’. Remnants of this scaffolding survive in the present text, not least in the sense of surrender to chance and higher divination which permeates the poem.

The Tarot cards also provided an enlivening basis for autobiography since they encouraged it to develop thematically rather than cronologically. It is partly through this thematic focus that the poem avoids a narrow documentary style of narrative and becomes a far more broad-ranging work.

Tony Conran sketches the universe within self exploring themes of cosmic longing, meditations on mortality, myth, sex and politics. He movingly evokes what it was like growing up as a child with cerebral palsy in wartime Wales, then being a student, poet and Catholic in Bangor, struggling with his place in the social world against the backdrop of the Thatcher years, coming to grips with death in the short third movement and finally undergoing spinal surgery to halt increasing physical paralysis.

Conran avoids self-pity and succeeds in transforming the personal by relating it to larger patterns of meaning. He uses a wide range of poetic and dramatic techniques in a modernist text with echoes of many canonical poets and references to the Bible, Irish and Welsh legends and Scottish ballads densely woven into the whole poem. It’s a potent mix, uncommon today.

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What Brings You Here So Late?

‘I wanted to write a long poem with the weight and shaping authority – what Northop Frye calls the ‘encyclopaedic form’ - of the traditional epic. The trouble is, in the world of the epic, the hero is always a hero. Episode might follow episode but they don’t contradict each other, the hero’s role is not up for grabs. In modern life, though, we live through many different roles and many different worlds. Even in Wordsworth’s Prelude some of the episodes seem to be straining to escape their allotted place: it is well known that he composed many passages out of their narrative order. I wanted a form that involved dialectic between episodes, between roles and between worlds.

In the opening chapter the division of myself into ‘the Leopard’ and ‘poor love’ was in fact built into me, more of less in those terms, from the age of ten onwards. Leopard and poor love are joined by other personae as the story proceeds – the ‘Hermit’ when I first came to college as a student, ‘the Twin’, ‘the Wise Fool’ and in the fourth movement by ‘Platypus’ when I was in intensive care after a life-threatening operation. Other personae join in from time to time but all in their turn are me – the boy in the ballad which opens the poem, who stands his ground against the knight on the road.’
Tony Conran

‘A new volume of poetry by Tony Conran is a significant event in the culture of contemporary Wales. Both as poet and as critic, he has been a giant figure on the scene for over half a century.’
Professor M Wynn Thomas, School of English, University of Swansea

‘It is difficult to imagine how English-language poetry in Wales would have developed, from the 1960s onwards, without the hugely influential presence of Tony Conran – as poet, translator, critic, dramatist and general one-man cultural turbine. In 1967, he gave Wales and the world The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse, the most successful translations of 1500 years’ worth of Welsh poetry ever published (before or since), a book whose extended introduction represents both a concise cultural history of Wales and a challenging bardic manifesto. He has himself lived by the demands of that manifesto, making ambitious poems – from an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist stance – that celebrate cultural coherence and communality, and, in the process, sing a Wales of the future into vibrant being. Not for him the responsibility-dodging ironies and apologetics of demure self-expression; conscious of the Welsh poet’s traditional socio-political stance while at the same time invoking the powerful engines of Modernism, Tony Conran is one of only two or three Anglophone poets with the authority to deliver a major national statement, as in the controlled fury of his ‘Elegy for the Welsh Dead in the Falkland Islands, 1982’.

A nationalist with an internationalist’s deep interest in poetries way beyond his own country, he is capable also of the ‘loneliness, tenderness and slenderness’ that he identifies as the defining qualities of the haiku, of which – as of much else – he has been a pioneer in Wales. If ‘Anglo-Welsh’ poetry has been rather more Anglo than Welsh in recent decades, Tony Conran’s always unpredictable writings have been a restorative antidote to such Anglicizing tendencies.’
Nigel Jenkins, Poet and ed. Encyclopaedia of Wales

‘Tony Conran writes of the poet and artist David Jones as constructing, from Wales's past, meanings for her future: communal, non-capitalist, uncoercive. In this sense, and given the scale of his achievement, Tony Conran is by far the finest poet in the Modernist tradition that Wales has produced since David Jones.’
Professor Tony Brown, School of English, University of Bangor

‘Tony Conran is one of the most important literary figures in Wales. The conspicuousness of his work as a translator, critic and literary historian has tended to distract attention from his equal importance as a poet. His poetic canon is substantial and has drawn upon a Welsh tradition and at the same time modernised it, so that his poems have simultaneously proved the value of that tradition and revealed the contemporary relevance, for example, of Welsh ‘praise’ poetry. Much of this work has received far too little attention, even in Wales, so that few people are aware that his long poem Castles is one of the most important books of poems published anywhere.

In his latest book, What Brings You Here So Late, Conran for the first time has written in an extensively autobiographical vein, so that the long poem is not only valuable for its own poetic sake, but also provides invaluable clues to Conran’s other literary activities. Placed in this context his work is refreshed by reference to the pressing concerns of his personal life which memorably include his account of his experience, as a spastic, of growing up disabled. Throughout this account, which starts in childhood and traces his development through to the present, Conran explores, with his characteristic intelligence, the complex relationship between the personal and the written life, and the result is, like Castles, vivid and revealing and challenging.’
Professor Ian Gregson
School of English, University of Bangor
Poet and Critic