A Poem by Lynette Roberts

We head into the second week of Wales Readathon 2020 with a poem from a neglected Welsh writer

Today I share with you a poem penned by a writer I greatly admire. She was an experimental modernist, principally admired as a war poet, who published only two collections.

Lynette Roberts (or Evelyn Beatrice Roberts) was born in Buenos Aires in 1909 to parents of Welsh origin. She moved to London as a young woman, where she studied art at the Central School for Arts and Crafts, before marrying the Welsh author and editor Keidrych Rhys in 1939 (Dylan Thomas was their best man). She moved to the village of Llanybri with her husband and remained in Wales until her death in relative obscurity in 1995.

Her work was held in high esteem by Eliot, Thomas and Robert Graves.

 

Curlew by Lynette Roberts

A curlew hovers and haunts the room.
On bare boards creak its filleted feet:
For freedom intones four notes of doom,

Crept, slept, wept, kept, under aerial gloom:
With Europe restless in hís wing beat,
A curlew hovers and haunts the room:

Fouls wire, pierces the upholstery bloom,
Strikes window pane with shagreen bleat,
Flicking scarlet tongue to a frenzied fume

Splints hís curved beak on square glass tomb:
Runs to and fro seeking mudsilt retreat;
Captured, explodes a chill sky croon

Wail-íng… pal-íng… a desolate phantom
At the bath rim purring burbling trilling soft sweet
Syllables of sinuous sound to a liquid moon

Till window, wide, frees thin mails of plume,
Fluting voice and shade through clouds moist sleet:
A curlew hovers and haunts the room.