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After the First Death is an extensive collection of poetry and prose by some of Wales’s finest and best-known writers of the twentieth century. The selection is eclectic but there are inevitably certain voices that predominate: Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, R. S. Thomas, Alun Lewis and Dannie Abse are the most strongly represented here, interspersed with a host of other great names, such as Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Raymond Williams, Dylan Thomas and Tony Curtis. Perhaps most pleasing, in an anthology that could very easily have been monopolised by male writers, is the fact that the editor has been careful to include women’s voices, with contributions from Sian James, Gwyneth Lewis, Kate Roberts, Caitlin Thomas, Gillian Clarke and Stevie Davies, to name just a few.
The tone is, of course, generally sombre, often shocking, always gruelling. There is little room for lightness here. Each piece has clearly been chosen with thought and care and deserves to be read with similar respect and attention; this is not a book to be read lightly or in a single sitting.
The editor has achieved a fine balance of poetry and prose. Although, for me, the prose extracts from longer works do not always stand alone successfully, many of them have made me aware of books I should like to read in full: Raymond Wiliams’s Loyalties, Wyn Griffiths’s Up to Mametz, Stevie Davies’s The Element of Water.
In his introduction, the editor mourns the loss of ‘many moving remembrances from those who actually fought in the trenches – raw, honest unliterary works’. I think this is a loss for readers, too, and I was sorry not to find the promised bibliography indicating sources for such pieces. Perhaps we could have a companion volume of those raw unliterary works . . .
Suzy Ceulan Hughes
It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.
Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.
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Table of Contents: Contents
9 Introduction
13 R.S. Thomas – Welsh History
The Great War 1914-1918
17 Wilfred Owen – Anthem for Doomed Youth
17 Edward Thomas – ‘Recruits’
19 Siân James – ‘Church and State’
20 Bertrand Russell – Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell,
July 1916
22 Siân James – ‘Allies advancing’
24 Robert Graves – ‘The Welch Regiment, at Cambrin’
26 Frank Richards – ‘Christmas 1914’
26 Tony Curtis – From the City that Shone
27 Robert Graves – Letter to Siegfried Sassoon, 2nd May 1916
28 Siegfried Sassoon – The General
28 Ivor Gurney – First Time In
29 Robert Graves – Sospan Fach
30 Wilfred Owen – Dulce et Decorum Est
31 David Jones – ‘The Queen of the Woods’
34 R.S. Thomas – Remembering David Jones
35 Saunders Lewis – Letter to Margaret Gilcriest,
4th January 1917
36 Edward Thomas – ‘Ronville’
38 Edward Thomas – Lights Out
39 Edward Thomas – Letter to Merfyn Thomas, April 1917
40 Siegfried Sassoon - ‘Before Mametz’
41 Wyn Griffiths – ‘Mametz Wood’
43 Gwyneth Lewis – The Telegraph Baby 1916
43 Edward Thomas – ‘Beaurains’
45 Edward Thomas – As the team’s head-brass
46 Corporal Ivor Watkins – ‘Gas!’
47 Jack Jones – ‘The thick of it’
50 Lady Margaret Davies – ‘Those mad British girls’
50 Lily Tobias – ‘The Task’
55 Wilfred Bowden – ‘To encourage the others’
56 David Gwenallt Jones – Dartmoor
56 Kate Roberts – ‘A great shock’
60 Jonah Jones – ‘His “little war” ’
63 Wilfred Owen – Strange Meeting
The Thirties
67 R.S. Thomas – ‘The war to end all wars!’
68 Emyr Humphreys – ‘Roll of Honour’
68 Gwyn Thomas – Letter to Nana Thomas, Christmas 1940
69 Dylan Thomas – I dreamed my genesis
70 Richard Hughes – ‘The Nazi Labour Camp’
73 Tony Curtis – The Portrait of Hans Theo Richter and
his Wife Gisela, Dresden, 1933
74 Dannie Abse – ‘July 1934’
75 Jack Jones – Letter to the Miner’s Lodge, Cross Hands,
March 1938
76 Dannie Abse – ‘Jimmy Ford’
81 R.S. Thomas – Guernica
82 Raymond Williams – ‘Spain, February 1937’
92 Dannie Abse – ‘Freud, Marx and Sid Hamm’
96 Goronwy Rees – ‘A winter in Berlin’
101 Dannie Abse – ‘The night of broken glass’
106 Richard Hughes – ‘Hitler’s coup’
110 Christopher Meredith – My mother missed the beautiful
and doomed
112 Glyn Jones - ‘Autobiography’
113 Tony Curtis – The Death of Richard Beattie-Seaman in the Belgian Grand Prix, 1939
114 Dylan Thomas – The hand that signed the paper
The Second World War
117 Raymond Garlick – ‘Looming and sombre’
117 Gwyn Jones – Editorial from The Welsh Review,
October 1939
122 John Davies – Riders, Walkers
123 David Lloyd George – Letter to Frances Stevenson,
4th October 1940
125 Dylan Thomas – Letters to Vernon Watkins, 1940
128 R.S. Thomas – ‘Local danger’
130 R.S. Thomas – Homo Sapiens, 1941
130 Alun Lewis – All day it has rained
131 Alun Lewis – ‘A fine life’
133 R.S. Thomas – ‘Others were brave’
133 T.E. Nicholas – To a Sparrow
134 Dannie Abse – ‘The sudden shock of battle’
135 Meic Stephens – Homer
136 Goronwy Rees – ‘This strange purgatory’
141 Harri Webb – On Convoy
142 John Ormond – ‘The city split in two’
145 Vernon Watkins – Sonnet on the Death of Alun Lewis
145 Alun Lewis – The Earth is a Syllable
149 Alun Lewis – Burma Casualty
151 Alun Lewis – ‘The duties of the evening’
154 Tony Curtis – Incident on a Hospital Train from
Calcutta, 1944
155 Gweno Lewis – ‘A regular camp-follower’
157 Alun Lewis – Letter to Gweno Lewis, 30th September 1943
159 Alun Lewis – Letter to Robert Graves, 6th May 1943
161 Alun Lewis – Goodbye
162 Caradoc Evans – ‘Hitler in Aberystwyth’
163 Lynette Roberts – Swansea Raid
164 Caitlin Thomas – ‘Drunken Waistcoat’
166 Dylan Thomas – A Refusal to Mourn, the Death by Fire,
of a Child in London
166 Dylan Thomas – Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred
167 Lynette Roberts – Crossed and Uncrossed
168 Sarah Waters – ‘The Blitz’
174 Wynford Vaughan-Thomas – ‘Anzio’
178 Raymond Williams – ‘Normandie, July 1944’
187 Dannie Abse – “All change!”
188 Tony Curtis – Soup
189 Tony Curtis – A Visit to Terezin
189 Lord Elwyn Thomas – ‘Margit’
192 Tony Curtis – Crossing Over
193 Dannie Abse – ‘The camp’
193 Dannie Abse – Cousin Sidney
194 Alun Lewis – Raiders’ Dawn
Post-War, Cold War, New Wars
197 Nigel Heseltine – Hero of his Village
197 Christopher Meredith – Averted Vision
202 Tony Curtis – The Grammar
204 Gillian Clarke – Oranges
204 Dannie Abse – Not Beautiful
205 Dylan Thomas – ‘Knocking down air-raid shelters’
207 Goronwy Rees – ‘A sinister enchantment’
212 John Davies – Pursuit
213 Owen Sheers – War Wound
213 Sheenagh Pugh – Bolshies
214 Stevie Davies – ‘The Fatherland’
219 John Tripp – Pay Detachment, Exeter
220 John Tripp – Derring Lines ’45
222 John Tripp – Burial Party
223 Leslie Thomas – ‘The train from Kuala Lumpur’
233 Dannie Abse – A Night Out
234 Dannie Abse – After the Release of Ezra Pound
235 Dannie Abse – The Sheds
235 Dannie Abse – Case History
236 Dannie Abse – Demo against the Vietnam War, 1968
237 Tony Curtis – Veteran, South Dakota, 1978
238 John Davies – Borrowing the Mauser
239 Leslie Norris – A Small War
240 Roland Mathias – A Letter from Gwyther Street
241 Dannie Abse – ‘The death wind’
242 Tony Curtis – The World
243 John Tripp – Defence of the West
246 Peter Finch – The Death of King Arthur Seen as a
Recent War
247 Tony Conran – Elegy for the Welsh Dead, in the
Falkland Islands, 1982
249 Tony Curtis – Friedhof
250 Anna Wigley – Soldier
251 R.S. Thomas – The Hearth
252 R.S. Thomas – ‘The mushroom-shaped cloud’
252 Christopher Meredith – Occupied
253 Sheenagh Pugh – Two Retired Spymasters
254 Gillian Clarke – The Night War Broke
255 Tony Curtis – Crane Flies
256 Gillian Clarke – The Field-Mouse
257 Tony Curtis – From the Hills, the Town
257 Robert Minhinnick – The Yellow Palm
258 Sally Roberts Jones – Remembrance Day, Aberystwyth
259 Dannie Abse – Remembrance Day
260 Leslie Norris – Autumn Elegy
**
263 Edward Thomas – The Owl
264 Biographical Notes
269 Acknowledgements Author Biography: Editor Tony Curtis is a prize-winning poet and editor of a number of anthologies. He is Professor of Poetry at the University of Glamorgan and has a new collection of poetry, Crossing Over, published in 2007. He has also edited Wales at War, a collection of essays about writers, artists and their relationship with war in the twentieth century Further Information: This is the first comprehensive anthology of writing about war in the twentieth century from Wales.
While few of us now living have had direct experience of war, in uniform or as civilians, it is likely that the wars our families fought or suffered in, and more recently the fear of nuclear war or terrorism, will have played a significant factor in our lives. War has shaped Wales more than any other force through the last century. The two world wars challenged, broke and shaped political borders, traditions, societies, individuals and their beliefs more profoundly than the wars of previous centuries.
Through their fiction, poetry and journals, as well as by their direct action in battle and in protests against war, Welsh men and women have made some of the most memorable responses to those challenges.
All the major writers of Wales are represented, from Edward Thomas, who died on the Western Front in 1917, to prize-winning contemporary novelist Sarah Waters. The anthology also includes Dylan Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Wyn Griffiths, Kate Roberts, David Jones, Sian James, Dannie Abse, Alun Lewis, R.S. Thomas, Robert Graves, Gillian Clarke, Leslie Thomas, Raymond Williams and many others.
After the bombs, the bullets, the marches and the medals come the words:
'After the first death, there is no other'.
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