In 1939 the poet Lynette Roberts, following her marriage, went to live in a small village in Wales. This experience, both enriching and isolating, became the source of some of her extraordinary poetry. Her diary observes daily life in a Welsh village in wartime with a poetic intensity.

Yn dilyn ei phriodas yn 1939, ymgartrefodd y bardd Lynette Roberts mewn pentref bychan yng Nghymru. Roedd y profiad hwnnw yn un a'i cyfoethogodd, er ei fod yn brofiad unig, a daeth yn sail i rai o'i cherddi gorau. Mae ei dyddiadur yn ddarlun o fywyd bob-dydd mewn pentref Cymreig adeg y rhyfel.

Lynette Roberts - one of the icons of twentieth-century Welsh literature. One of the few English-language poets who has used the assonance, alliteration and internal rhyme of the traditional Welsh englyn with quiet discretion and success (‘Calling cattle from celandine and clover, Song of joy I sing’ from ‘Rhode Island Red’), but who was also innovative and experimental in style and form (‘Rainshiver’, with its repeated use of words containing long, thin letters, was written to look like rain on the page: ‘Chills the air and stills the billing birds/To shrill not trill as they should in/This daffodil spring’). A poet’s poet. And yet she published only two collections of poems in her lifetime and disappeared almost entirely from the literary scene in her mid-forties, when she had her first breakdown.

Drawing on various sources, Patrick McGuinness has compiled a fascinating collection of Roberts’ prose writing that is a perfect companion to the Collected Poems published in 2005, as well as an essential introduction to the poet’s life and her views on just about everything: from language and literature, of course, to politics, education, equality, religion, spirituality, architecture and even agricultural policy.

Roberts’ ‘Carmarthenshire Diary’, ‘Welsh Essays’ and ‘Village Dialect: Seven Stories’, all included here, show how deeply she immersed herself in the life and culture of the small rural village of Llan-y-bri in west Wales, where she lived for ten years (1939-49). Many of her poems were written there and draw directly on her experiences of rural life and her intimate relationship with the land, the village and its people. In the ‘Literary Memoirs’, we glimpse other aspects of her life, as she takes tea in London with the Sitwells, discusses her work with T.S. Eliot at Faber and, most intriguingly, makes pilgrimage to Granada to visit the gypsy caves and the home of Federico García Lorca, thus connecting with her Hispanic roots (she was born and brought up in Argentina). And then there are the ‘Letters to Robert Graves’ and the ‘Notes for an Autobiography’...

This is a wonderful book, finely edited, and it is only to be hoped that McGuinness will complete the trilogy with a biography of this extraordinary woman.

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.