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Ian Gregson finds ambiguity and ambition abound in the welcome publication of Lynette Roberts' Collected Poems.


Lynette Roberts,
Collected Poems
Patrick McGuinness


Carcanet
£12.95 Paperback
ISBN 1857548426


Lynette Roberts published two books of poems: Poems in 1944, when she was thirty–five, and Gods With Stainless Ears in 1951. She moved in the most exalted literary circles – she knew T. S. Eliot (her editor at Faber), Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, David Jones and Edith Sitwell. There was also readily to hand for her a literary grouping with which she could have been helpfully associated, and therefore more readily placed in context: the ‘First Flowering’ of Anglo–Welsh poetry (David Jones, Dylan Thomas, Idris Davies, Vernon Watkins, Alun Lewis, Glyn Jones) were her contemporaries. Their work has many and varied links to her own, including a biographical one because they published in Wales, the journal of poetry and criticism, which was edited by Keidrych Rhys, who she married.

   Despite these advantages her work has suffered neglect of a kind which illustrates the vagaries of reputation in the literary world. Working against her was a change in poetic fashion – the reaction against modernism in the 50s would inevitably have made her dense and intense writing seem alien and pretentious. But she was not helped, either, by the brevity of her writing career, not much more than a decade. And her subsequent fate – she became a Jehovah’s Witness and suffered a severe mental breakdown – may well have confirmed the prejudices of a male–dominated literary scene exemplified in Dylan Thomas’s description of her as ‘A curious girl, a poet, as they say, in her own right...with all the symptoms of hysteria’.

   Mental instability and religious eccentricity compound what is the most interesting aspect of Roberts’ sensibility for poetry readers now, especially in Wales – her status as an outsider, which is also the most substantive way of accounting for her neglect. She may have been briefly an insider in literary London, but her background made her an exotic hybrid: her parents were of Welsh descent, but she grew up in Argentina where her father moved to work as a railway engineer – his own family had lived in Australia since 1840. Her sonnet ‘Argentine Railways’ pictures her father walking down a railway line, and amongst eucalyptus trees in a corral for cattle. On the other hand, while she was writing her best poems she was living in Wales, in the village of Llanybri, and she made herself deeply knowledgeable about Welsh literature and culture, and evolved her own poetic techniques in a creative dialogue with the Welsh–language tradition.

   Such hybridity is highly relevant to a contemporary sense of the
destabilising of national identity, and it is appropriate that Lynette Roberts has been edited by Patrick McGuinness who lives in Wales and identifies himself with its literary culture, but was born in Tunisia and is half Belgian and half Irish, and whose poems are preoccupied with borderlands. His ‘Belgitude’ characterises the condition of being Belgian as beyond national identity in any stable sense, referring to the country as ‘the first post–national state’, so that it calls into question the concept of home to such an extent that fitting in requires ‘looking out of place’ – a pun which implies both personal unfamiliarity and the state of looking beyond place altogether. Roberts looked so out of place in Llanybri that she was suspected of being a spy; her ‘Raw Salt on Eye’ is about as close as a poem can get to a shriek of pain about the sense of anxious isolation she suffered as a result, and of anger directed at her principal persecutor, Amelia Phillips, and of desolation that such persecution should accompany the separation from her husband who was away fighting in the Second World War.

   It is true, as McGuinness says, that Roberts expresses an ‘organic
vision of community’ in relation to both Argentina and Wales; her sense of community links her to a specifically Welsh tradition, and lies behind her practice of the praise poem. The sense of not belonging is therefore especially telling and acute; it is linked to her hybridity, and, like that ambiguity in her national identity, can be read, now that tight communities have been superceded, as something symptomatically foreshadowing a state of being which has become much more widely shared – the contemporary sense that none of us belong, wherever we are. In ‘Earthbound’, when the poet hears that a man has died in the village she is gazing at herself in the mirror applying lipstick, an action which implies a boundedness inside her self confirmed by the literal colouring of her perspective so that the ‘reflected van’ looks ‘like lipstick’, and by her awareness that she knew only the externals of his life. In a community of which she was genuinely a part, the wreath she makes would have been received as a tribute which would serve to consolidate the collective life of the village – instead, ‘No one stirred as we offered the gift.’ It’s appropriate, then, that her dominant themes arise from the fracturings and losses inflicted by the Second World War.Gods With Stainless Ears is a long poem in five parts which reflects the impact of the war on a coastal Welsh village, and needs to be considered alongside other problematic modernist poems which mingle registers, and self–consciously multiply their structural methods, most notably in Roberts’s case involving cinematic techniques such as intercutting and montage. It’s heavy going and everywhere suggests a poet standing on tiptoe, a poet whose reach alarmingly exceeds her grasp, but who is capable of justifying her ambition with passages of grandiloquence which are uniquely her own. Roberts’Collected Poems is a very welcome publication, and we should be grateful for it not just to Patrick McGuinness but also to her earlier champions, notably Tony Conran, John Pikoulis and Nigel Wheale.