literature
The Last Bard: loops of an invented tradition
By now the ‘invented tradition’ is itself a tradition. Since Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger published their edited collection The invention of tradition in 1983, we’ve become familiar with the idea that rituals, histories and beliefs that seem age-old were actually recent fictions devised with specific purposes in mind. One of the chapters in The […]
Thomas Traherne goes walking
Today Thomas Traherne is counted alongside George Herbert and Henry Vaughan as one of the great ‘metaphysical’ poets of the seventeenth century. All three, interestingly, were men of Welsh and Welsh Borders origin. Herbert was born in Montgomery, Vaughan came from Llansantffraed near Talybont-on-Usk and returned there to live, and Traherne was probably born in […]
‘Ymharadwys’: Pentre Eirianell
Yn ddiweddar digwyddodd imi fod mewn sgwrs ebost â thenant presennol Pentre Eirianell. Hwn yw’r hen dŷ fferm ar ymyl Bae Dulas ar Ynys Môn lle magwyd ‘Morysiaid Môn’ – Lewis, Richard, William, Elin a Siôn (neu John) Morris – yn gynnar yn y ddeunawfed ganrif. Gwelais i’r tŷ am y tro cyntaf ym Medi […]
In praise of Kathleen Jamie
The half of me that’s Scots lies buried, and usually dormant. It comes to life when visiting Scotland. But since my parents died, there’s less obvious reason to go, and we’ve not been there for a few years. Sometimes I daydream about moving to live in a newly independent Scotland, released from bonehead, vicious British […]
Vernon Watkins: a second visit
This year’s Haf Bach Mihangel, the forecasters say, will come to an abrupt end tomorrow, on the autumn equinox. But today’s a perfect day: hot, with sunshine from dawn to dusk, and only the slightest of breezes. I’m walking the coast to Oxwich. After climbing out of Pwll Du Head the path is easy going, […]
Emily Dickinson’s ‘What care the Dead’
When I’m distracted or glum I often reach for the poems of Emily Dickinson. I’ve an old copy of Thomas H. Johnson’s complete edition, published in this country by Faber. It’s less of a book and more of a box. With its stocky build and 770 pages it looks like a box of postcards. You […]
Chaos describ’d
These days chaos as a concept has been captured by mathematics and physics. (Sometimes it gets re-exported to the popular imagination through tropes like the butterfly effect.) But before that it was available to anyone. It was especially attractive to philosophers, theologians and mystics, and to creative people like writers and artists. Chaos has always […]
Cymru a W.G. Sebald
Cyhoeddodd W.G. Sebald Austerlitz, ei nofel olaf (os mai nofel yw hi) yn Almaeneg yn 2001. Pan ddaeth y fersiwn Saesneg allan yn 2002, roedd yn syndod i ddarllenwyr yma i ddarganfod mai Cymru yw un o’i phrif leoliadau, mewn llyfr sy’n crwydro dros rannau helaeth o gyfandir Ewrop. Hanes dyn o’r enw Jacques Austerlitz […]
On sparrows
Obituaries lift the heart. They’re the part of any newspaper or magazine to turn to first if you want to cheer yourself up by reading about the positive side of human nature. At the moment, when the news pages resemble an unending nightmare by Hieronymus Bosch, that’s especially true. Last week I read on Twitter […]
‘Reports of my death’: the many lives of Jean Rhys
False news is now so natural a part of our world that few people are surprised to read about the deaths of people who remain stubbornly alive. There are plenty of examples, many of them recent. Wikipedia lists over 300 in one of its more amusing pages, List of premature obituaries. The ‘reported death’ people […]
