Library of Wales : Reviews

Williams is a writer better known for his work in literary and cultural studies than his fiction, but his often over-looked novels are important texts nonetheless. Border Country, Williams’s first novel and part of a border trilogy, is the story of the experiences of Matthew Price, a London-based lecturer, on his return to his family home in Glynmawr in the Welsh Marches. His visit is prompted by his father’s poor health, and his return home causes both characters to (re)consider aspects of their lives and their relationship. Their exploration of their shared memories – especially those of the 1926 General Strike – reveals both personal histories and the social history of the mid-twentieth century Welsh nation.

Borders are a central motif of the novel – it was completed at the end of the 1950s, a time when the boundaries between literary and cultural theory were becoming more permeable. Indeed, the novel itself can be seen to occupy a boundary as it stands between fiction, reality and theory – it is strongly influenced by Williams’s critical work. This is most evident in the exploration of the socialist movement in the novel – the accounts of the General Strike and the disagreements between Harry, Matthew’s father, a railway signalman, and the local entrepreneur. Further, the novel has near autobiographical elements as Matthew Price’s position as an intellectual with working-class roots echoes that of Williams himself. The novel negotiates the dilemma of such individuals: are they ‘organic’ intellectuals, emergent from their from that society who work for that society, or are they exiles, outsiders who are distanced from the political influences of their past? The position presented by the novel is that the past of the intellectual undoubtedly influences their work, but that they must write of the present of their communities from a distance. The liminal position of exile-returned is reflected in the novel in a matter central to Matthew’s identity – his name. He was registered by his father as Matthew Henry Price, despite his mother’s wish that he be named William; thus, over time Will becomes his Welsh identity, Matthew his intellectual, professional and English name.

The other significant border that permeates the novel is that between Wales and England – both the physical border as defined by maps and the metaphoric and cultural differences between the two nations, illustrated by Matthew’s experience. The importance of identity in the region is further emphasised as the Welsh Marches is a marginalized area of a marginalized nation. This, as well as Matthew’s research on migration in the nineteenth century Welsh coalfield are used by Williams to reveal how Welsh identity and social history are continually oscillating.

Although Border Country is a deep engagement with the role of the intellectual, the nature of history, Welsh identity and social change, the novel is primarily an affecting and moving consideration of the relationship between father and son and an exploration of the space between the people we once were and the people we are now.

Sarah Morse

‘HE SAT DOWN, TRYING TO BREATHE EASILY. ABOVE HIM ON THE COMPARTMENT WALL WAS THE FAMILIAR MAP. WALES, IN THIS DRAWING, LOOKED MORE THAN EVER LIKE THE HEAD OF A PIG, WITH THE EARS UP AT PWLLHELI, THE EYE AT ABERDOVEY, AND THE LONG SNOUT RUNNING OUT TO FISHGUARD, WITH PEMBROKE DOCK FOR A MOUTH. PIG-HEADED WALES THEN, IS IT? AND US AT ITS THROAT. STUBBORN, SELF-WILLED, BLIND, I’M LEAVING? NOT REALLY. NOT ALTOGETHER. WHATEVER IT IS, IT GOES WITH YOU AND COMES BACK WITH YOU. THE LINES ON THE MAP RAN OUT INTO ENGLAND, AND HE FOLLOWED THEM .’ 388-89

The Babel Guide to Welsh Literature, September 29, 2005

Poetry 1900-2000

One hundred poets from Wales

edited by Meic Stephens

PARTHIAN ISBN 978 1 902638 £12.99

This is certainly a remarkable book, 875 pages long. 100 poets, some 600 poems in all. If you are going on holiday to some boring place like Lanzarote or Malta, take it with you. It would be good to read each poem, preferably aloud, against some unsuitable background.

It's a fine production. I send my congratulations to the factory which produced it, Gomer, in Llandysul, especially the type-setter and whoever was responsible for the binding. You could throw this book against your garage wall and it would still be in one piece: it's 42mm thick!

But of course, principally, this is a tribute to Meic Stephens. Nobody else could have edited it up to this standard. His work here has been outstanding. What is so fundamentally impressive is the high-level intellect, the sheer grinding scholarship, that he has brought to this text. Both on the side of fact-stating, bibliography and biography and on the side of critical comments on the poet's work, which are generally swift, unobtrusive and accurate. In future, when students are looking for the details of a Welsh writer's life and work, they will look in to this volume for correct information. Meic Stephens, with his huge knowledge of Welsh writers, has done this editing so well - fairly, sensitively and comprehensively.

It may be that 100 poets is too-large a number; that perhaps he has been too generous with the selection of verse from those born after 1950. On the other hand, genuine poets such as Deryn Rees-Jones and - the last in the book- Owen Sheers well deserve their place.

Going back to the beginning, it is interesting how the tone and syntax of W.H.Davies (the first in the book), A.G.Prys-Jones, Wyn Griffith and Eiluned Lewis are very much of the twentieth century; and how the work of Idris Davies is so clearly biographical and social, without sentiment or cliche. R.S.Thomas, born 1913, the year before Dylan, is represented mainly by his earlier work, and his selection finishes with the superb 'A Marriage': "We met/ under a shower/ of bird-notes./ Fifty years passed,.../ She was young;/ I kissed with my eyes/ closed and opened/ them on her wrinkles.." Ah, what style, what poise; over forty years of practise at verse-writing went into that poem. And Dylan, is of course, impeccably repesented, including the rhetoric of 'Ceremony After a Fire Raid' and the superby economic and resonant 'In My Craft or Sullen Art'.

Leslie Norris's work is impressive. His handling of language is deft and ambitious. His 'Autumn Elegy' is as fine a poem as you'll find anywhere: "..I am not accustomed to such opulent/ Panoply of dying..But that I remember again what/ Young men of my own time died/ In the Spring of their living..They died in their flames..Now as the trees burn..." And I much liked his 'Peaches' and 'His Father, Singing'. These in a way set the standard for the whole book.

Herbert Williams, rightly, has eight poems; beautifully written, his plain diction and steady voice coming over clearly. Sally Roberts Jones, in 'Palm Sunday' and 'Community' re-creates place, time and mood. I am pleased that Meic Stephens included three of his own poems. 'Ponies Twynyrodyn' deservs its place in any anthology, the writing capturing the physical realities; and 'Hooters' re-creating the world of the boy in the valley village standing at the window hearing the pit hooters: "We now live in this city:..I sleep easily, but waking tonight/ found the same desolate clangour in my ears/ that from an old and sunken level/ used to chill me as a boy..."

I hope that the above is enough to assert that there is very substantial work in this book.

On page 153, the Editor writes: " [there is a ] tension between English-speaking Swansea and Welsh-speaking West Wales.." This comment, modified, can be applied to the book as a whole. In the first half, there is a sense of the Welsh-speaking world, mostly South Wales. It permeates the English text, creating tones, rhythms, tempos which belong in the work of dozens of Wales's English-language poets born, say, before 1945. Then, it gradually dies away, as the language loses its place in the community, fostered through chapel and school. At the same time, particularly in the coal valleys of south Wales, the economy changes as the pits close; the communities begin to lose their spirit of harmony and other-directedness. The economy and culture of the money-society starts to dominate. The writers who come later in this volume have less of the effect of the Welsh language in their work. And they do not transmit, sometimes unknowingly, that sense of a shifting of the tectonic plates of society; that influence upon writing is benign; it makes for better verse: more focus; necessity, conviction; more intensity; more meaning. Only through an anthology of this range and depth, covering a century of writing, can one see how the styles and substances change.

Congratulations to Meic Stephens on a job very well done.

Roundyhouse Magazine, February 1, 2008

A Welsh Landmark

Poetry 1900-200 Meic Stephens

Extract of a review by Tony Brown in Cambria

“Poetry 1900-2000 is ... a cultural act, and a landmark in the English language writing of Wales. It is by far the most comprehensive collection of Welsh poetry in English in the Twentieth-century which we have had – or likely to have.

It is important to emphasise that this is not an anthology of poems just about Wales or what it is to be Welsh. This is poetry that should, and does look to wider horizons and universal things, albeit that poetry is produced by a Welsh consciousness that can inscribe itself in the most unlikely places.

Well designed and handsomely produced, this wide ranging and authoritative anthology will be indispensable to those who are new to the English-language poetry of Wales and will bring new poems to the attention of those already familiar with the field.

Tony Brown, Cambria

Cambria Magazine, February 2, 2008

Ron Berry’s vivid and often brutal novel tells the story of a fictional British Champion boxer, Hector Bebb, whose life is unravelled by violence. A snapshot of 1960s Cymmer, South Wales (complete with dialects) where the people are hard-working, hard-drinking, and hard-fighting, the novel traces the effects of violence and savagery – that which is legitimised by war and by the boxing ring, as well as that which is not tolerated by a civilised society.

We join Hector in training for his come-back fight, following a year long suspension for biting an opponent. His story is told through a variety of perspectives – as well as Hector’s voice, there are thirteen other narrators including his trainer and mentor, his manager, his wife, and other amateur boxers, past and present. Woven into the story of his preparations therefore, are memories of how Hector started to box, accounts of fights through the years, and an exploration of the relationships of those connected to Hector and the other members of the White Hart Boxing club.

Hector’s obsessive preparations pay off, as he wins the British Champion Middleweight title. However, the following night, Hector’s fists rob him of glory as he punches, and kills, Emlyn Winton, his wife’s lover. With the police looking for him, he says ‘So Long Hector Bebb’, adopts a new identity and becomes an outlaw like the heroes of the pulp-Western novels he reads. The violence of the boxing ring is replaced by the savagery of survival on the hills above Cymmer and Tosteg. This existence is made increasingly difficult as the landscape is undergoing a process of industrialisation – and taming – itself, by the planting of swathes of Forestry Commission conifers.

The juxtaposition of the celebrated violence of the boxing ring, and the Coldra Café punch-up is startling, and Berry uses it to reveal the fragility of social conditioning. The reactions to the assault are divided – but no-one condemns the violent act; some characters believe that Hector should have struck his wife, while others think that the act was a legitimate husband’s revenge. Each character sees violence as the only solution, revealing that they too are not as civilised as they seem. The reader is encouraged to question this standpoint through the portrayal of those who are victims of ‘legitimate’ violence, most significantly Mel Carpenter, a boxer left brain-damaged after losing a fight to Hector, and Prince Jenkin Saddler, a maimed war veteran, physically and psychologically scarred by his experience of battle. Both are now distanced from society – one in a mental hospital, the other by his solitary existence farming on the hills.

In Hector’s situation, the reactions of the community, the haunting memories of a maimed war veteran and the violence of the boxing ring, Berry illuminates the fine line that separates the supposedly civilised from the savage and demonstrates the fragility and hollowness of modern social conditioning. The barely cloaked greed, want and lasciviousness of many of the characters reveal that Hector is not the only ‘trained animal’.

Sarah Morse

‘NOW, WHEN THESE PAPERS SPLASH HECTOR’S FACE ALL OVER THEIR FRONT PAGES, CALLING HIM A BRUTAL MURDERER, I SUGGEST IT’S TIME WE MEMBERS OF THE GENERAL PUBLIC CAME TO REALISE THAT LIFE ISN’T A MONASTARY GARDEN WITH NIGHTINGALES HOPPING ABOUT THE BUSHES. FALL BACK ON POLITICS, ON RELIGION IN ANY KIND OF ARGUEMNT, AND STRAIGHT AWAY YOU FALL BACK ON MURDER. IT’S US AS WE ARE. IT’S YOU AND ME, IT’S ONE AND ALL. WE CAN DO FOR MEN, WOMEN, AND KIDS WITH PUNCHES, WITH BULLETS, BOMBS, OR BY SIGNING AUTOGRAPHS.’ 123

The Babel Guide to Welsh Literature, September 29, 2005