The work of an original, haunting and experimental woman modernist poet is made available again, for the first in 50 years. Lynette Roberts is principally a war poet, in that her two published collections take as their subject a woman's life in wartime. But she is also, or therefore, a love poet and a poet of the hearth. A late-modernist, she works on two scales at the same time: the mythic and the domestic. Those poets and readers who have valued Roberts' work have been experimentalists. Even at this distance, she challenges and instructs, at the level of diction, syntax and achieved form. She relentlessly opens out the language of poetry, she is free with extremes of subject, scale and conception, and her work has flourished in its very marginality. Now, with republication, she is restored as an extraordinary poet in the development of twentieth century British poetry. As a Welsh writer, her best work stands alongside that of her near-contemporaries, David Jones, R.S. Thomas and Dylan Thomas. As a woman poet, her work bears comparison with that of both Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes.

Table of Contents:
Table of Contents Preface by Angharad Rhys Introduction by Patrick McGuinness Poems (1944) Poem from Llanybri The Shadow Remains Plasnewydd Low Tide Raw Salt on Eye The Circle of C Lamentation Broken Voices Earthbound Spring Rhode Island Red Ecliptic Blue Poem [We must uprise O my people.] Woodpecker Curlew Moorhen Seagulls Fifth of the Strata Thursday September the Tenth House of Commons Crossed and Uncrossed The Seasons Orarium In Sickness and in Health Blood and Scarlet Thorns Rainshiver Royal Mail The New World Argentine Railways Xaquixaguana River Plate Canzone Benedicto Cwmcelyn Notes on Legend and Form Gods with Stainless Ears. A Heroic Poem (1951) Preface Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Notes Uncollected and Unpublished Poems To a Welsh Woman Song of Praise Poem [In steel white land] Englyn Green Madrigal [I] Transgression The Hypnotist (Welsh Englyn) Love is an Outlaw These Words I Write on Crinkled Tin Two Wine Glasses Ty Gwyn The 'Pele' Fetched in A Shot Rabbit Llanstephan Madrigal Displaced Persons Saint Swithin's Pool Brazilian Blue It Was Not Easy Chapel Wrath Trials and Tirades Angharad Prydein Out of a Sixth Sense Green Madrigal [II] Premonition Mockery Red Mullet The Tavern The Temple Road The Grebe He alone could get me out of this The Fifth Pillar of Song Bruska's Song Pendine Release Downbeat Appendix Radio Talk on South American Poems El Dorado (1953) Patagonia (article published in Wales, V, 7, Summer 1945) Notes Index of First Lines