Reflections at 60 | Memories of the Eighties

Words by Cary Archard, Editor of Poetry Wales 1980-86

_{Cary Archard in the 80s, provided by author}

It’s the sheer number of Special Numbers that stands out now. There were the issues wholly devoted to the Davieses – Idris, Kitchener and W.H. And those with a focus on David Jones, Glyn Jones and Leslie Norris among others. And, looking back with the advantage of hindsight, one of huge significance, devoted to a poet who had been largely forgotten by 1980, though in the Forties she was admired by Robert Graves, Alun Lewis and T.S. Eliot who, while editor at Faber & Faber, published her two poetry books. Lynette Roberts might have lived a quiet life in Llanybri in the Carmarthenshire countryside but being married to Keidrych Rhys (bustling editor of seminal magazine, Wales), she was also close to the heart of literary life in Wales.

It’s clearer to me now that my main intention, as the new publisher and editor of Poetry Wales, had been to reawaken interest in neglected poets and perhaps help to create a sense of tradition of Anglophone Welsh poetry. In 1981 John Pikoulis, biographer of Alun Lewis, took me to meet Lynette at her home in Lammas Street in Carmarthen. She cooked us some lunch on her belling stove (chops?) and agreed to some of her work appearing in Poetry Wales. On the way out, did I catch in the corner of my eye a painting by Wyndham Lewis leaning against a wall in a downstairs room? When the special issue appeared, it included her poems, part of a journal, artwork and critical essays on her writing. It also included a tranche of her letters to Robert Graves, her essential contribution to his extraordinary White Goddess. Recently Lynette Roberts’ poetry and prose has been made available again and her importance to the literary life of Wales secured. Though it’s not at all clear that that is what she would have wanted. Poets are not necessarily that above all else they may be. Rereading her letters, it is clear that she was very conflicted. Her deeply held Jehovah Witness beliefs caused her unrest. For a poetry editor, poetry was all. For Lynette Roberts, the spiritual state (and touchingly, that of my children) was a far more important concern, the central matter.