Tag: English poetry
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Books of poems: gwallter’s top 10
For want of shelf space, I’m having to lay new books horizontally, on top of earlier books. They threaten to warp and then turn solid, like sedimentary rocks. Soon I’ll need to have another cull. I doubt, though, whether the censor will make much of an impression on the three-shelf-long poetry collection. Books of poems…
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A playing card with feeling
Last week the National Trust kindly asked me to give a talk based on the items in an exhibition in Newton House, Dinefwr, Unlocked: 125 objects from Dinefwr. The choice of objects, most of them connected to Newton House and Dinefwr Park, was up to me. I could hardly fail to include one commonplace but…
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Battle of the buildings
Felicia Hemans, the leading woman poet of the Romantic period in Britain, came to Wales in 1800 when she was seven years old. (Felicia Browne was her original name: her father, George, owned a wine-importing business.) Her first home was a cottage near Abergele, before the family moved in 1809 to St Asaph to live…
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The poet and the mapmaker
As the Russian government continues its murderous and destructive war on Ukraine, it seems a good time to turn to a voice for peace. Here’s a poem from the time of what is still called, mistakenly, the English Civil War, by an obscure poet from Norfolk, Ralph Knevet. Entitled ‘The vote’, it is a simple…
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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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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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John Clare and the snipe
Slow radio at its best achieves what no amount of ‘fast radio’, with its assumption of the attention span of a hoverfly, can achieve: thought connections that stay in the mind long after the programme has ended. Paul Farley’s recent day (half an hour on the radio: The Poet and the Snipe) looking, in vain,…
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Edward Thomas in Gower
At last some warmth returned with the sun, and I took the rough path along the top of the cliff between Rotherslade and Limeslade. The sea was calm, empty and quiet, except for one thing: the bell of a floating buoy, its clear sound carried over the water by a light onshore breeze. I’ve been…
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Closely observed hot chocolate
From my early childhood, an evening mug of hot chocolate has been a small but constant source of comfort. I suspect it’s a common addiction. Chocolate drinking is not a failing that many grown-up people own up to, and certainly not one that many would think of writing about. A notable exception is the poet…
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Sir Humphrey Mackworth, ‘a genius richer than thy mines below’
The earth, thy great exchequer, ready lies is the title of a superb new collection of stories by the Welsh writer Jo Lloyd, who won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2019. The nine pieces are very different one from another, in subject, setting and register. But they all share at least two things.…