Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems (5 page)

Travelling down through ‘currents/ of ice, emerald streams and blue
electric
lakes’ they return to the post-war desolation of a ‘bleak telegraphic planet’, finding
a ‘Mental Home for Poets’ in the now-derelict bay. There are perhaps associations
of the Fall, but the divergence between the ‘
argument
’ and the final stanzas of the poem cause problems: the ‘argument’ is pessimistic
and suggests the sundering of the couple and failure of
liberation
and renewal. The girl, alone, ‘turns away: towards a hard new chemical dawn’, the
soldier ‘walks meekly into the mental home’. In the poem, however, the feel is on
the contrary optimistic, defiant, vibrant:

This volume also presents a selection of Lynette Roberts’s uncollected and unpublished
poems, many of which were intended for the volume that never appeared,
The Fifth Pillar of Song
. Eliot’s rejection of the book is understandable. Though there are many original
or successful poems, it is uneven and confused. Its best poems are those, like ‘The
“Pele” Fetched In’ or ‘Saint Swithin’s Pool’, which have simplicity and depth, and
in which there is a sense of the cosmic embroiled in the everyday. Many are simply
unsuccessful or underworked, or caught up in bombast and capital-lettered abstractions.
The poems chosen here are intended to represent the best of the unpublished or uncollected
work, though a few examples of latter
category
are included to give the reader a sense of the whole. The final section of the book
contains three texts. The first is the ‘ballad for voices’
El Dorado
, a breathlessly told, Wild-West-style adventure about the murder of Welsh colonists
by a group of Indians in 1883-4.
El Dorado
was a poem for radio, and should be considered as such: it has colour, adventure
and pace, but it
does not measure up – as poetry – to the rest of Roberts’s work, and is not a gaucho
Under Milk Wood
. Also in the appendix is an article by Roberts on Patagonia, first published in
Wales
, in which she discusses the incident retold in
El Dorado
, and the text of a radio talk she gave on her South American poems.

It seemed inevitable that Roberts’s poetry would be charged with ‘
obscurity
’, a charge often levelled against women poets of a modernist bent – Mina Loy, Marianne
Moore, Laura Riding, to mention just three (it is always the men who are ‘learnèd’
and the women who are ‘obscure’.) In a letter of 3 December 1944, Graves wrote to
Roberts to air his own doubts:

Graves could hardly disguise his ambivalence. Her reply is remarkable for its self-assurance:

A similar uncertainty about Roberts’s diction underlies Eliot’s query about ‘Poem’
(later the opening of Part II of
Gods
): ‘The words
plimsole, cuprite
,
zebeline
and
neumes
seem to exist but I think that bringing them all into one short poem is a mistake’,
he tactfully suggests in a letter of 24 November 1943. The following month he accepts
these words, telling her that he is convinced by her reasons – ‘I like your defense
of your queer words and now accept all of them, but I am still not happy about
zebeline
’.
22
Eliot’s are
editor’s queries, but Graves’s are more obviously grappling with something larger.
The point of view Graves puts forward in his letter to Roberts is articulated in many
of his critical interventions, from the
Survey of
Modernist Poetry
(1927) which he wrote with Laura Riding, to the Clark Lectures of 1954. For Graves,
‘modernism’ is essentially a fractured response to a fractured world: for all its
innovative bluster, it is tired, pessimistic and passive. It reveals something of
Lynette Roberts’s faith in what she was doing that she should have stood her ground
so single-
mindedly
against poets of the stature of Graves and Eliot.

In a review of
Gods with Stainless Ears
, the
Times Literary Supplement
critic complained that ‘the vocabulary needs a chemical glossary’, going on to dismiss
‘the contrast between the high tragic tones of the poet and the naivety of her incidents’
as ‘irresistibly ludicrous’ (16 November 1951). The review is dismissive, but the
reviewer has a point about the poem’s contrasts: between grandiloquence and something
altogether more artless or innocent. Tony Conran, in an essay on Roberts in his book
Frontiers in
Anglo-Welsh Poetry
, offers perhaps the most perceptive comment made on what we could call Roberts’s
contextual lack of context:

Conran is right, not just in the detail of Lynette Roberts’s place in the poetic tradition,
but in the more sweeping suggestion he makes about the
relationship
between the modernist and the primitive. We need not go along with the term ‘primitive’
– even if Conran is careful to use it in inverted commas – because after all Roberts
was educated, well-read, artistically trained, and, for all her ‘outsiderness’, moved
in literary circles, but we can see what he means. We might prefer the term ‘naïve’
in the specific sense of the naïve painters, the tradition of Henri ‘Douanier’ Rousseau.
A painterly poet, Lynette Roberts was herself 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 Charles Olson
of
Maximus
. In her modernism of the local she perhaps recalls (again in a limited but precise
way) the William Carlos Williams of
Paterson
. In other respects – its tendency towards emphatic alliteration and assonance, its
rhapsodic descriptions, vatic
registers
and grand abstractions – her poetry belongs to the 1940s, alongside the work of the
‘Apocalypse’ and New Romantic poets. As well as the poets of
this period, Roberts shares something with the artists, specifically with painters
such as Ceri Richards and Graham Sutherland, who worked on the peripheries of the
literary scene of the time. Most strikingly perhaps, her poetic aerial views are also
reminiscent of Eric Ravilious, war artist with the RAF, whose dramatic coastlines
and images of planes and submarines make interesting comparison with Roberts’s. Her
work is also part of the twentieth-century flowering of Welsh poetry in English, the
tradition of Dylan Thomas, Glyn Jones, Vernon Watkins, R.S. Thomas. Like these poets,
Roberts has learned from the Welsh-language tradition, not just in verse technique
but in literary heritage and cultural politics. Add to all this the work of Auden
and MacNeice, and we have a poetry bristling with contexts, alive to its time and
place even as it dazzlingly dramatises and reimagines them – a poetry open to influence
and example while perfecting its own distinct voice and vision.