Down the centuries, poets have provided Wales with a window onto its own distinctive world. This book gives a sense of the view seen through that special window in twelve illustrated poems, each bringing very different periods and aspects of the Welsh past into focus. Together, they give the flavour of a poetic tradition, both ancient and modern, in the Welsh language and in English, that is internationally renowned for its distinction and continuing vibrancy.
This anthology of Welsh poetry and English translations presents some of Wales's radical and reactionary responses to the French Revolution and its cultural legacy, 1789-1805.
Welsh is the oldest surviving Celtic language, and the most flourishing. For around fifteen centuries Welsh poets have expressed an intense awareness of what it is like to be human in this part of the world in poems of extraordinary range and depth. And despite the global tendency towards homogenisation, Welsh poets have fought back, drawing inspiration from both the traditional and the contemporary to forge a new and rainbow-like modernism. This wide-ranging anthology of 20th-century Welsh-language poetry in English translation - by far the most comprehensive of its kind - will be a revelation for most readers. It will dispel the romantic images of Welsh poets as bards or druids and blow away any preconceived mists of Celtic twilight. This poetry is full of vitality, combining old craftsmanship and daring innovation, humour and angst, the oral and the literary. The selection brings together poets of every hue: from magisterial figures like T Gwynn Jones, R Williams Parry and Saunders Lewis to folk poets such as Alun Cilie and Dic Jones; from cerebral poets Pennar Davies and Bobi Jones to popular entertainers Geraint Løvgreen and Ifor ap Glyn. There are Chaplinesque poets, rebellious and subversive ones, lyrical voices and storytellers. The variety is enormous: from Welsh performance poetry to song lyrics; from the wry social comment of Grahame Davies to the contemporary parables of Gwyneth Lewis, who writes different kinds of poems in Welsh and English. This exuberant chorus of voices from the margins of Europe proves that poetry in this minority language is far from stagnant. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.
The most complete and current edition of Dylan Thomas' collected poetry in a beautiful gift edition celebrating the centenary of his birth The reputation of Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century has not waned in the fifty years since his death. A Welshman with a passion for the English language, Thomas’s singular poetic voice has been admired and imitated, but never matched. This exciting, newly edited annotated edition offers a more complete and representative collection of Dylan Thomas’s poetic works than any previous edition. Edited by leading Dylan Thomas scholar John Goodby from the University of Swansea, The Poems of Dylan Thomas contains all the poems that appeared in Collected Poems 1934-1952, edited by Dylan Thomas himself, as well as poems from the 1930-1934 notebooks and poems from letters, amatory verses, occasional poems, the verse film script for “Our Country,” and poems that appear in his “radio play for voices,” Under Milk Wood. Showing the broad range of Dylan Thomas’s oeuvre as never before, this new edition places Thomas in the twenty-first century, with an up-to-date introduction by Goodby whose notes and annotations take a pluralistic approach.
This anthology of Welsh poems from c.575 to c.1525 offers the general reader the most substantial collection of medieval Welsh verse yet rendered into English, in translations that will support the claim that this poetry is one of the finest literary achievements of the Middle Ages. Drawing on Professor Clancy's acclaimed Medieval Welsh Lyrics (1965) and The Earliest Welsh poetry (1970) this comprehensive anthology presents over 150 poems, eloquently translated that render poetry as poetry. A lucid introduction, ample notes and a glossary provide the background needed for a full appreciation of the poems.
Gwyneth Lewis is a bilingual virtuoso, publishing separate collections in English and Welsh. Chaotic Angels brings together the poems from her first three English collections, Parables & Faxes (1995), Zero Gravity (1998) and Keeping Mum (2003).
"Poetry 1900-2000 brings together a vibrant expression of the industrial, pastoral, rural, urban, religious, political and linguistic experience of Wales in the twentieth-century world. The poetry collected here is as varied as Wales itself, and ranges from the well known to the startling, from the lyrical to the experimental, the celebration of tradition to that of protest. Each poet's biography situates the writer in a social and literary context, and the collection presents an unparalleled panorama of the development of Welsh poetry in English in the twentieth century." --Book Jacket.
Welsh Court Poems is the first of ten volumes in the new Library of Medieval Welsh Literatureseries, which aims to make Middle Welsh literature available to English-speaking scholars and students who wish to study it in its original language. In keeping with that aim, Welsh Court Poems makes the poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries available for the first time to this readership--presenting thirty-three of the 236 poems published by the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. Each poem appears in the original Middle Welsh accompanied by a full scholarly apparatus in English, providing a point of entry for any scholar interested in Middle Welsh poetry itself or researching comparative literature in other languages, other periods of Welsh literature, and medieval history.
