Thanks for that, David, it's a very thoughtful piece, and I think I withdraw
my previous reservation about 'always'.

I can think of one poet in Wales who is working along the kind of lines that
resemble what people like Trevor Joyce and Randolph Healey are doing
elsewhere: Ian Davidson.

best

david b


----- Original Message -----
From: David Kennedy <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, February 09, 2001 3:58 PM
Subject: A Long Post About Welsh Poetry in English


> I thought it might be useful if I posted the relevant section of my
review.
> [This is a long posting so if you're not following this thread here's your
> chance to dump now]
>
> "I began by referring to the brevity of Amy Wack’s introduction. One
assumes
> that this was done to avoid the trap that lies in wait for all anthology
> editors: having the introduction reviewed at the expense of the contents.
As
> a co-editor of The New Poetry I can certainly sympathise! Nevertheless,
even
> a short introduction attempts to define how the work anthologised is
> presented and how the editor hopes it will be received. In this context,
> Wack raises a number of points which I want to examine in detail not
because
> I disagree with them but because they hint tantalisingly at important,
wider
> issues which are all concerned with Welshness. Amy Wack recently wrote in
> these pages of a new poet that ‘Despite her residence here, Wales appears
> only once, in the form of a bunch of daffodils’ but Oxygen does not convey
> what is Welsh about its English language poets except birth or later
> residence. Wack does try to confound clichéd definitions of nationality,
the
> sort of thing Duncan Bush once described as a youth running onto the pitch
> at Cardiff Arms Park ‘carrying the national emblem: a leek, of felt, as
big
> as himself.’ However, the book is subtitled ‘new poets from Wales’ and
this
> inevitably raises expectations in potential readers. I don’t think anyone
is
> expecting leeks and dragons at the start of the new millennium but I was
> expecting more of the uneasy but unavoidable engagement that animates
Deryn
> Rees-Jones’s poem
> ‘Connections’ - not included here - which pictures ‘a Welsh mountain I can
/
> Just remember - mynydd - a word I can’t pronounce too well.’ If, as Wack
> argues, the English poets in Oxygen are ‘children of the information age’
> whose ‘tastes are sophisticated and rarely plain’ then this is more the
kind
> of take on identity and origin one would expect.
> [...]
> Amy Wack goes on to assert that ‘Wales does reasonably well in the
> production of poets. We do have some way to go in fostering a cultural
> climate as favourable to them as those in Dublin or Edinburgh.’ Leaving
> aside the  strangeness of comparing an entire country with two capital
> cities, this begs a number of questions. First, few poets seem interested
in
> following Stephen Knight’s lead in The Sandfields Baudelaire and writing
an
> Anglo-Welsh dialect equivalent of Kathleen Jamie’s and Bill Herbert’s
> energetic Scots poetry. Second, I’ve often wondered why Wales appears to
> lack writers comparable to the broadly neo-modernist Irish generation of
> Trevor Joyce, Billy Mills, Catherine Walsh, Maurice Scully and Randolph
> Healy. Third, there is another missing generation in Wales. It is very
easy
> to construct a narrative of postwar British poetry in which writers from
the
> periphery - in terms of class or geography - who were born in the period
> 1935-45 have gradually occupied the mainstream with work which deals
overtly
> with issues of class, education and internal colonialism. Three writers
who
> would group together quite naturally in such a narrative are Douglas Dunn,
> Tony Harrison and Seamus Heaney but it is difficult to find a Welsh writer
> who, as the saying goes, ‘fits the profile’. John Davies - another
massively
> under-rated poet - has written Harrisonian poems about his relationship
with
> his father but these form only a small part of his work. Gillian Clarke’s
> best work has a comparable historical focus but it real emphasis seems to
me
> to be on asserting the value of the feminine in a masculine culture and
> mythology.
>     If this analysis is correct - and I offer it for further debate - then
> it suggests that
> Anglo-Welsh poetry lacks precisely the things that have made Irish,
Scottish
> and regional English identities into what might be termed highly tradable
> commodities in poetic terms. As a consequence, the most recent generations
> of Anglo-Welsh poets lack literary contexts to position themselves in or
> react against. But I also want to suggest that the reasons for the
apparent
> unavailability of Anglo-Welsh poetic identity - both inside and outside
> Wales - might actually be historical. In a survey of nationalist movements
> in the British Isles between 1900 and 1939, the historian J. H. Grainger
> argues that Wales was ‘a country without the institutional bases for
> separateness.’ Indeed, after its annexation by England in 1536, Wales had
no
> governmental institutions that differed significantly from those of
England
> apart from
> the Council of Wales which was abolished in 1689. And because Welsh
> distinctiveness was primarily linguistic, Grainger goes on to argue, it
> became intrinsically cultural rather than political. [...]  This is
crucial
> because of the particular absences I mentioned earlier. And this suggests
to
> me that poetry needs an established and vibrant political culture because
it
> ’s politics that drives all the factions and schools that make other
> poetries in English so various, so constantly surprising and so readily
> identifiable."