Anthologist – Preface: Jonathan Edwards
Translation: Stergia Kavvalou
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Rhys Owain Williams, Rhian Elizabeth, Glyn Edwards, Hanan Issa, Grug Muse, Emily Blewitt, Zoë Brigley, Joe Dunthorne, Mari Ellis Dunning, Iestyn Tyne, Natalie Ann Holborow, Rhiannon Hooson.
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‘Too far for you to see,’ writes RS Thomas in ‘The Welsh Hill Country.’ It’s a phrase which sums up much of the experience of being Welsh, our lines of sight, in all senses, moulded by the geography of Wales. To grow up here is to look in any direction and to see a hill: over that peak and in the next valley are people we love who, for all we know, today, may not exist. These hills are horizons of place and expectation. They are evidence that on the fifth or sixth day of creation, your man himself got peckish for some dessert and, knowing that Welsh things were best things, chose our gorgeous land as the area he would take his ice cream scoop to. Welsh people learned early that it was a bit of a pain in the arse to get anywhere in Wales and, in truth, Transport for Wales have done little to make the twenty-first century on that one any easier. Better to stop where you are, on the whole. By the fire. With these books. Why wouldn’t you, anyway, when there’s all this glory? Perhaps as a result, Welsh poets are often figures of idiosyncratic, extraordinary brilliance, one-offs who seem to come out of nothing because they have often developed away from everywhere. From the completely individual, exhilarating voice of Dylan Thomas and the innovations of Lynette Roberts and David Jones, through the specific worldview and subjects of RS Thomas, to the music and ability to speak for a community of Gillian Clarke, each new Welsh poet gives the world something that absolutely no one else could.
And so the writers represented in this anthology follow their own paths. Sometimes they are funny, sometimes sad and sometimes both together. Sometimes they write about Hecate, sometimes about Tom Jones and Gareth Bale. Sometimes they give us sestinas and sometimes poems shaped like telescopes. Whatever happens, they will have things their way. They will do whatever the hell they want and, good god, it will be great. Gathering this work together for publication in this way, I am struck again by just how rich the work of young poets in Wales is. It is clear from the work in this anthology that the future of Welsh poetry is very bright indeed. That’s not too far for me or anyone else to see. I am as certain of it as I am that if I look away from this screen, to the right, now, through the window, I will see the same hill I have seen all these years, the autumn colours which seem to grow more astonishing each time I look at them. If I could speak to it now, I would say this. You’re something to end this introduction with, hill. You’re something for me to pick up a pen, right now, and write a bloody cracking poem about.
Jonathan Edwards