Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems (3 page)

Lynette Roberts is in an obvious and precise sense a war poet. Her poetry describes
bereavement, privation and loss, the brokenness and fracturing of experience both
for the combatants and for those left at home. But she is also a poet of the hearth,
of community, of continuity and survival. She does not idealise the domestic world:
it is extreme, heartbreaking, cruel, and perhaps her greatest achievement in
Poems
is the conviction with which she describes women’s life in wartime. Troubled scenes
of domesticity recur in her work, and the depth of contentment depicted in ‘Poem from
Llanybri’ is not typical. Roberts is uniquely able to express the way modern war is
reflected and refracted, projected and screened or watched from afar. And as in ‘Swansea
Raid’, it is also in constant danger of being turned into something spectacular. Her
poems often register the liminal moments when danger tips into spectacle and spectacle
into danger. In ‘Earthbound’ the poem’s speaker describes sitting at her make-up table
and hearing of the death of a local boy:

The preoccupation with reflections is characteristic of Roberts’s subject as well
as her imagery, from the handmirror at the dressing-table to the ‘Sun splintered on
waves’ of Part I of
Gods with Stainless Ears
. The home front is not a refuge so much as a screen onto which the drama of war is
projected and scattered, real but estranged, intangible but touching all aspects of
life. Hence perhaps her poetry’s insistence on images of reflections and
refractions
, of film, news broadcasts and sound recording. In this context we may think of Keith
Douglas’s poem ‘How to Kill’, in which the poem’s speaker sights the enemy soldier
‘in the dial of my glass’. He gives the order to fire: ‘Being damned, I am amused/
to see the centre of love diffused/ and the waves of love travel into vacancy’.
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‘How to Kill’ is built around metaphors of distance: the technology of death ensures
one can kill from far away, just as the ‘damned’ speaker is emotionally distanced
from his own action. It is real and unreal: the glass brings the image closer but
keeps its reality at bay, while the words ‘diffusion’ and ‘waves’ (Douglas was surely
evoking the language of radio and cinema broadcasting here), insist on war experience,
even for the combatant, as something projected, technologically mediated and disembodied.
There is a marked insistence on such images in Roberts’s poetry too. ‘Catoptric’ (produced
by or relating to mirrors or reflections) is one of her many unusual words, and her
poems abound in images of glass, prisms, shiny metals and alloys, water, ice, mirrors
and polished surfaces. In his review of Keith Tuma’s
Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry
, the poet John Wilkinson discusses Roberts as an example of what he calls ‘frostwork’:
‘window glass which is semi-opaque through its decoration; that is, poets whose writing
exhibits a sustained balance between linguistic surface and reference to an internal
or external world’.
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For Wilkinson, Roberts is a test case in the perennial debate: between poets who
write as if language were the clear pane that renders the world as it is, and those
for whom language not only alters what we see, but is a part of it, needing itself
to be rendered.

In her diary Roberts describes the event on which ‘Earthbound’ is based, and how she
and one of the village’s evacuees make a wreath for the dead boy. The image is of
two outsiders engaged in an act of community. Though the mirror scatters and inverts
at the start of the poem, the wreath is circular and cyclic:

The poem sets the whole against the broken, the circle against the
fragment
, peace against war, without lapsing into melodrama or sentimentality.
Poems
is crossed with bereavement. ‘Lamentation’ opens with Lynette’s view of herself as
the outsider: ‘To the village of lace and stone/ Came strangers. I was one of these/
Always observant and slightly obscure’. It goes on to connect her own loss, the miscarriage
of her child and the ‘
emptiness
of crib’, with the devastation caused by an air raid that has killed animals on the
farm:

The lost child is a small but insistent presence in her poems, often figured as a
shadow (most obviously in ‘The Shadow Remains’). In Part IV of
Gods
, the child announced in Part I has been miscarried:

In other poems it is the mythical and the legendary dimensions that seem to shadow
daily life. ‘The Circle of C’ opens in a matter-of-fact tone out of keeping with the
poem’s arcane subject:

It is a puzzling poem, but her notes on it are (like many of her notes) offered in
good faith:

This is typical of Roberts’s use of unusual references: she has (mostly) a clear idea
of the connections between images and ideas, and her method of association, if sometimes
hard to follow, is not designed to mystify us or make us toil through thickets of
notes. That it sometimes fails is more down to lapses of method or confusion of effect
than a deliberate attempt to write ‘obscure’ poetry. Compared with the notes, say,
of T.S. Eliot, in parts more delphic even than the mysteries they elucidate, or those
of David Jones or Ezra Pound, Roberts’s notes are artless and straightforward (this
does not of course stop her from failing to provide notes for passages that need them).
‘The Circle of C’ moves from the mysterious prophetic mode (she is told that her lover
‘will come not as he said he could come/ But later with sailing ice, war glass and
fame’) back into the ordinary, domestic world. The movement back to the home fire
is similar to that of ‘Swansea Raid’:

Life is experienced as a sort of doubleness, unfolding in a mythic-domestic continuum.
In poems like these, it’s as if the everyday was myth’s lived double. Roberts’s poems
constantly make the connection between quotidian existence and the legendary or mythical
forms they echo or project. In Part II of
Gods with Stainless Ears
, the geese ‘sleeve their own/ Shadows’. It is one of the poem’s many extraordinary
yet precise images, and provides a way of thinking about the relationship between
past and present and future, about myth and daily life, and about the poet and her
many projected selves. Roberts often identifies with historical or mythical characters,
such as Rhiannon and Branwen from the Mabinogi, strong women wronged, trapped, outcast,
or reduced to domestic drudgery; women who lose their children and are failed by their
husbands. In
Gods with Stainless Ears
, the woman is at the Singer sewing machine – a ‘perfect
model scrolled with gold, // Chromium wheel and black structure, firm on/ Mahogany
plinth’ – making an aertex shirt for her soldier lover. This is a machine-age Penelope
awaiting her returning warrior.

The language of
Gods with Stainless Ears
is already emerging in poems such as ‘Spring’, poems pitched somewhere between the
futuristic and the pastoral:

If myth is time plumbed, then geology is place plumbed – Roberts is fond of the language
of geology and archaeology, of strata and rock formations, the Palaeaozoic and the
Cambrian. Often, as in
Gods with Stainless Ears
, it is the aerial view that dominates, the airman’s or the bird’s eye view, and poems
proceed by dazzling climbs and swoops: planes and birds, emotions and states of mind,
all partake of that energising verticality. But, as in ‘Spring’, there is also the
view from the grass blade, from the sustaining earth – poetry that seeks depth as
well as height, aiming for the core as well as the zenith.

To a sense of place, Roberts adds an organic vision of community. In her South American
poems she pays the same attention to cultural details, to the architecture and customs
of the native people, as she does to those of the Welsh community she lives in. Whether
writing about Welsh cottages, Incan temples or huts with corrugated roofs, Roberts
is guided by a sense of the intimate bond between people, landscape and habitation.
In an article for
The Field
called ‘Simplicity of the Welsh Village’ (the word ‘simplicity’ is a touchstone in
her writing), Roberts claims that Wales’s ‘extensive peasant democratic tradition
[…] will harmonise with modern architecture’, and makes an audacious connection between
peasant
architecture
and the uncompromising modernism of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. Her poetry
makes similar connections between the old and the new, the ancient and the modern.
In the same article, she describes the
differences between Wales and England as inherent in their different cultures, landscapes
and psychologies:

For Roberts, this geometrical, angular vision is entirely compatible with the centuries-old
architecture of the Welsh village – her painterly eye is capable of seeing both abstract
and figurative, the soft contours and the hard edges of her landscape. In
Gods with Stainless Ears
the village is ‘
scintillating
/ Like mothball white on a hill’ and the air ‘planed’ into ‘euclidian cubes’. That
positive use of the word ‘estranged’ is telling too: in a sense, her poetry insists
on unfamiliarity, estrangement and foreignness as part of the experience of the poem’s
meaning, rather than as uncomfortable
incidents
on the way to clarity. In the notes to
Gods with Stainless Ears
she writes ‘I have intentionally used Welsh quotations as this helps to give the
conscious impact and culture of another nation’. The poet who talks about ‘my village’
and ‘our heritage’ is also alive to the richness of unfamiliar or defamiliarised.
In the same article she goes on, evoking the magnesium light of flash photography,
to describe the ‘penetrating power of the white sunlight of Wales’ as an explosive
revealer of forms: