The Urgency of Identity: Contemporary English-Language Poetry from Wales

by David Lloyd

Overview

This anthology of poems presents, for the first time in the U.S., the most important English-language Welsh poets of the 1980s and 1990s, and works illuminating the complexity, constant flux, and political implications of the poet's sense of inherited culture. A collection of fascinating interviews with the poets rounds out the exploration of the Welsh-English cultural divide.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810150072
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	07/06/1994
Series:	Contemporary English-Language Poetry from Wales Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

Editorial Reviews

This anthology brings together work by more than 15 Welsh poets who, apart from R. S. Thomas, are little known in the U.S., and includes interviews with poets and critics that place the poetry in the context of Welsh politics and culture. Central to that culture is a debate over language: Welsh is spoken by less than one-fifth of the population, but remains important to Welsh identity. Chris Bendon sums up the quandary of the Welsh writer writing in English: ``Someone speaks Welsh. Wales, (whatever that is) / becomes Wales again.'' John Davies gives a poetic, though perhaps not practical, solution: ``It takes / more than the one tongue to speak a country.'' Some of the common themes of Welsh poetry are nature, Wales's industrial past and economic hardships, and working the land. But although ``many of the poems / Carry the smack of loam,'' the younger poets here are innovators, too, influenced by other traditions than their own. Gillian Clarke's work stands out particularly, reminiscent of the metaphoric vitality of contemporary Irish poetry and the sensual frankness of the American. (June)

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