The elegiac epistle to Dylan Thomas which gives these new collected poems of Lynette Roberts its title is a remarkable work, apparently lost until its appearance in PN Review in 2014. Its conversational momentum in relatively linear syntax coupled with the emotional rawness and openness of its voice seem at odds with the difficult, linguistically complex modernism of most of her other poetry. Its initial two lines announce this more direct address:
To you Dylan with my own voice I pay tribute
With as natural a grace as though you were near;
Although the phrase has become a cliche of funeral eulogies, the act of “paying tribute” to the dead with one’s own voice links to an earlier poetic tradition, reminding the reader of the engagement with Welsh bardic history which is an abiding feature of Roberts’ work. “Paying tribute” in this earlier sense meant the formal honouring of a tribal chief (or another bard) which granted them fame and legitimacy, assuring their place within the collective oral memory of the community.
The autobiographical episodes in ‘A Letter to the Dead’ are celebratory of her friendship with Thomas rather than mournful, except when it comes to evoking his funeral. Again, they reveal a more expressive side to Roberts, generous to his memory and full of interesting, touching incidents (eg. identifying seabirds for him and joining him in drinking for the sake of his company although “I hated the damn stuff”). But the poem also doesn’t shrink from disclosing unhappier moments: after her divorce from the poet Kiedrych Rhys in 1948 (Dylan had been best man at their wedding), Roberts moved into a caravan in the graveyard at Laugharne with her children, the town where Thomas lived in his famous Boathouse:
The spirits in it rising
Over my stress and distress of doom
The poem’s wonderful, surging ending – made all the more poignant by the fact this was probably Lynette Roberts’ last poem – attempts to forge a connection between more benign spirits such as that of her dead poet-friend, invoking it as an energising force at a time (early 1954) when her work was moving in several directions. Despite The Endeavour (her novel about Captain Cook) being published in 1954, her projected third volume The Fifth Pillar of Song had been rejected by TS Eliot in his capacity as Poetry Editor at Faber in 1953. Although the introduction and later essay in A Letter to the Dead are generally excellent, I slightly disagree with Patrick McGuinness that this rejection is “understandable”.
It’s clear that Roberts was experimenting with a variety of themes and forms at this time, many influenced by Celtic mythology, early Welsh poetry and the abstruse materials she’d gleaned from working with her friend Robert Graves on that beguiling thicket of scholarship and magical thinking, The White Goddess (1948), to which she was the original dedicatee. The title poem ‘The Fifth Pillar of Song’, for example, alludes to Chapter 15 of The White Goddess in which Graves interprets the Seven Pillars of Wisdom from the Bible (Proverbs 9.1) as connecting to the seven days of Creation and seven days of the week, each with its “arboreal counterpart” in the Tree Alphabet he has previously reconstructed. Out of Graves’ “grammar of poetic myth” Roberts forges her own mythic embodiment of Welsh cultural heritage, tracing its lineage from ancient to modern and inscribing her place within it through primal sound and bardic song:
Because you produced the birth of sound within me…
O people of Cambria listen
for I have something to say
Closely linked to this there is another mode of experimental practice operating in these later poems, a tendency Charles Mundye in his ‘Epilogue’ characterises as “a more frequent intensification of the musicality of her poems”. Yet rather than harp back to a Symbolist emphasis on “musique avant toute chose” as other modernist poets had done, Roberts was looking towards other sources of acoustic synthesis. In 1953 she planned a Leverhulme scholarship to study the connections between African rhythms and Western poetry, “with an emphasis on rhythm in relation to social and national environment”. She used a talking drum in conjunction with poetry recital and later attended West African dance classes in London with Graves. This fascinating exploration of non-European musical traditions (including jazz) can be observed in poems like ‘Blues with a Rumba Background’ and ‘I’m yours’ with their insistent, syncopated rhythms. It prefigures the ethnopoetic approach later developed by Jerome Rothenberg, as well as jazz poetry and other collaborations.
This new Collected Poems has been expanded to more than twice the length of its predecessor, the first Carcanet Collected published in 2005. It has a new section of ‘Further Uncollected and Unpublished Poems’ (including ‘A Letter to the Dead’), the above-mentioned biographical Epilogue and some appealing new photos of Lynette. It presents her as a more rounded, multifarious character and as an ambitious, serious-minded writer, with one foot in the British modernism of the Apocalypse and one in a richer field of cultural enquiry that positions her work in a broader context. As Charles Mundye suggests, “Twenty years on from the first edition of her collected poems and it is still difficult to overstate the freshness and originality of her writing, and the distinctiveness of her voice and vision”.
Oliver Dixon 28th October 2026
