Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems by Lynette Roberts Read Free Book Online Page A

painter in the naïve tradition – one
     of her finest paintings, of Llanybri old chapel, depicts an angel circling above the
     village, with the bay in the background and enormous leeks rearing out from the vegetable
     patch (see opposite page). The painting is framed with a home-made border, designed
     by Roberts and based on the apron worn by Rosie, her neighbour. Often intricate, exact
     and harmonious ,the ‘naïve’ painting is also eclectic in its combinations of images, and plays fast
     and loose with perspective and proportion, facets which, in poetry, might be compared
     with tone, and specifically with irony, itself the manipulation of emotional distance.
     Roberts is certainly not ironic; she is never above her subject, and her subject is
     never beneath poetry. She writes a ‘Heroic Poem’ and she
means
heroic. The past is no refuge but a fund of analogies, an archive of correspondences;
     and there is no fear of the future. Her subject is ‘
today which is tomorrow
’ (
Gods with Stainless Ears
, Part V). Her work has no trace of cultural pessimism – on the contrary – and hers
     is not a poetry of ‘shored fragments’. It may be ‘difficult’ – indeed it seeks out
     difficulty as much as it seeks to ‘speak of everyday things with ease’ (as she writes
     in ‘The Shadow Remains’) – but it is not contorted with self-reflexiveness , knowing allusions, or arcane learning. Even the speech fragments, however cut loose
     from their sources, are transcribed from real utterance, so that raw, unmediated speech
     coexists with the most overwrought language. This is not the stylised demotic of
The Waste Land
. She also has an enabling – and in the best sense unsophisticated – belief in language’s
     sufficiency. We cannot imagine Pound or Eliot writing in their diaries: ‘I experimented
     with a poem on Rain by using all words which had long thin letters [so that] the print
     of the pages would look like thin lines of rain.’ Writing poetry is not ‘a raid on
     the inarticulate’ with shoddy equipment , but a way of bringing word and World into alignment. Her extraordinary freedoms
     of scale, subject and imaginative conception, her omnivorous diction and imagistic
     special effects, may at first glance appear similar to those of other modernist poets,
     but they are unique to Roberts, and to what we could call her ‘home-made’ world.

    Llanybri Old Chapel
by Lynette Roberts
    How to ‘place’ Lynette Roberts? And do we need to?
Poems
and
Gods with Stainless Ears
are unique books. Their freshness and originality are difficult to overstate, and cannot simply be explained by means of an intersection of influences
     and the convergence of biographical and cultural-historical circumstances. Certainly her work can be seen in the context of modernism, in whose
     second generation Roberts belongs. It obviously shares something with that of Pound
     and Eliot, but perhaps the nearest to her in vision and conception is David Jones,
     another poet who created from, and was created by, war and Wales. Her fascination
     with dialect and her cosmopolitan’s idealisation of the simple life, combined with
     a contrasting taste for new-fangled, specialised or abstruse vocabulary, suggests something along the lines of Conran’s modernist-primitive symbiosis. Roberts’s work is set
     within a few square miles of coastline, among a particular people, their customs and
     their idioms. Roberts has a sense of the absolute coterminousness of past-in-present-in-future, intertwined as in a Celtic pattern: the archaic is
     a luminous guide to the contemporary, the mythical is a map of the real. Hers is a
     world, as she writes in Part I of
Gods with Stainless Ears
, ‘where past/ Is not dead but comes uphot suddenly sharp as / Drakestone’. In her
     fascination with archaeology and geology, her sense of place as the layering of time,
     we might see unexpected (and strictly limited) similarities with the