literature

John Thelwall at Llyswen

April 29, 2022 0 Comments
John Thelwall at Llyswen

Next week we’ll be completing the Wye Valley Walk, and one of our stops will be the Griffin Inn in the village of Llyswen, on the banks of the Wye half way between Brecon and Builth.  Years ago, my colleague Jean Dane and I would often pause there for a coffee on our way from […]

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Y Lôn Goed a’r beirdd

April 22, 2022 7 Comments
Y Lôn Goed a’r beirdd

Rhodfa lydan â dwy linell o dderw a ffawydd oedd y Lôn Goed, a dim mwy na hynny, i ddechrau. Enw yn unig oedd y Lôn imi tan y ddiweddar, pan ddarllenais gyfrol ddifyr Rhys Mwyn, Real Gwynedd, a darganfod mai lleoliad go iawn yw hi.  Ac yn wir, lleoliad hanesyddol.  Fe’i lluniwyd gan John […]

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Funeral notes

April 15, 2022 4 Comments
Funeral notes

It’s been a bad six months for funerals.  Maybe the Grim Reaper has been busier than usual lately.  More likely, I’m now entering that danger zone of an age when I can expect him to visit my friends and acquaintances more often.  One consolation, if you can call it that, is that experiencing so many […]

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Ruth Bidgood at Ystrad Fflur

March 12, 2022 3 Comments
Ruth Bidgood at Ystrad Fflur

The poet and writer Ruth Bidgood died in Rhayader last week, six months short of her hundredth birthday.  She never raised her voice loudly in print, and few people, asked to name five contemporary Welsh poets writing in English, would probably have chosen her.  But the poems she wrote, in a steady stream over forty […]

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Cefn Bryn and the writers

February 25, 2022 0 Comments
Cefn Bryn and the writers

The sandsone ridge of Cefn Bryn is an obvious magnet for painters, but it doesn’t seem to have drawn many creative writers, despite its brooding presence along the backbone of the Gower peninsula.  One exception is Amy Dillwyn, the pioneering industrialist, feminist and lesbian, in her best-known work The Rebecca rioter (1880), an historical novel […]

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William Blake, map-maker

January 22, 2022 0 Comments
William Blake, map-maker

You can’t wander far in south and mid-Wales in the early years of the nineteenth century without coming across the name of Benjamin Heath Malkin.  The second edition of his book The scenery, antiquities and biography of south Wales, published in two volumes in 1807, was described by the historian R.T. Jenkins as ‘by far […]

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Cymraeg ar y mynydd

January 8, 2022 1 Comment
Cymraeg ar y mynydd

Enillydd cyntaf Gwobr Ysgrif O’r Pedwar Gwynt yw Rebecca Thomas, cymrawd ôl-ddoethurol yr Academi Brydeinig ym Mhrifysgol Bangor. Ei maes academaidd yw hanes Cymru yn yr oesoedd canol cynnar, a chawn beth o’i gwybodaeth drwyadl o’r pwnc yn ei hysgrif fuddugol, sy’n dwyn y teitl ‘Cribo’r Dragon’s Back’.  Er yn fyr, mae’r darn hwn yn […]

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Melesina Bowen’s ‘Ystradffin’

December 24, 2021 2 Comments
Melesina Bowen’s ‘Ystradffin’

In recent years many Welsh women poets of the past have been rescued from the condescension of posterity, not least in the anthology edited by Katie Gramich and Catherine Brennan.  But one of them has so far escaped much attention.  In 1839 Melesina Bowen published an unusual topographical poem in English called Ystradffin.  It deserves […]

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The black man and the atheist

November 5, 2021 0 Comments
The black man and the atheist

I’ve been reading, for the first time, A pilgrim’s progress.  I suspect that’s a rare event these days, at least in this country.  It’s easy to forget that John Bunyan’s book was for several centuries the most widely-read book in English, after the Bible, and the English book most often translated into other languages.  Calvinists, […]

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Moonrise

October 29, 2021 1 Comment
Moonrise

Among the eleven ‘Welsh sonnets’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins are counted some of the outstanding poems written in English in the nineteenth century.  They include ‘God’s grandeur’, ‘Pied beauty’ and ‘The windhover’. Hopkins came to live in St Beuno’s College near Tremeichion in the Vale of Clwyd in August 1874 to continue his extremely long […]

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