Regions of Poetry

Extract

A small anthology from the region of Cardiff claims to be of Anglo-Welsh verse. How can one tell Anglo-Welsh from Anglo-English verse? The blurb suggests ‘a Celtic sensitivity for the pattern of word and image’, but this seems to me to be taking refuge in the undefinable. This kind of sensitivity, without which a poet is not a poet, is the same the whole world over and what determines it is the extent to which his mind is moulded by the language and past of his people or moved to write by the problems of their present. In the context, as an example of the first, that is of a poet whose imagery and language seem to continue the life of Welsh poetry, I would give Vernon Watkins, who does not appear here and must be outside the terms of reference; and of the second, R. S. Thomas whose verse in the wider technical sense is hardly more Welsh than Edmund Blunden’s but who is concerned deeply with the scene and the soul of Wales. If the meaning I have tried to give to the term is accepted, in this anthology the poems of Glyn Jones fall into the first category, ‘Nonconformist’ by Robin Moffet into the second, but the majority could have been written by Englishmen in England. I sound harsher than I mean to: there are some good Anglo-English poems among them. There are more Anglo-Welsh poems in Mr Conlan’s volume from the same publisher and they are the best ones in it.