Mostly Welsh

This collection is rightly subtitled Poetry of Landscape, Love and Loss, but the author says of himself that he was 'always a traveller' and, in 'Retrospective', one of the longer sequences of poems, he describes his own life in terms of the Odyssey. The telling difference is how central his Penelope - his wife Kathy - is to the story. The book is dedicated to Kathy and the greater part of it is inspired by their relationship and his reaction to her death. The opening section, 'Cymric', is more varied and contains both personal history and his experience of landscape and society. The title poem, 'Mostly Welsh', shows his deft handling of form, as does the heartfelt credo, 'One People'. As a farmer, the lament 'Wilderness 2001, 2021' is profoundly despairing, but his response to the landscape itself, its streams and rivers, is more hopeful: 'Walking, I discover/ a new selfdom within the old, / a sole soul that still rejoices.' This section also contains some very interesting insights into relationships between generations, particularly the shifting sense of power and protection between fathers and sons in 'Absalom's Rise'. The poems for and about Kathy in the section entitled 'Reminiscences' are the heart of the book (although 'Lost Love' in the first section is one of the most poignant poems of loss). Poems such as 'Simply', 'Cariad', 'Love' and 'Lost' speak of a passionate mutual love, but even in 'Enduring Pictures in the Mind', 'the joy of first love' is tempered by the poet's later sense of mortality. In many of the poems he is haunted by lost time - times when they were apart (especially when he chose to travel), the time when he was ignorant of his wife's condition, and then the desolation of being alone. This is conveyed with honesty and intense feeling. Sometimes perhaps it is still in too raw a state, sometimes the chosen form does not quite suit the material, and occasional archaisms jar a little, but the reader is in no doubt of the powerful emotions expressed. The final section, 'Endings', is a series of short poems and contains some of the finest in the collection, such as the final three haiku and 'End of a Galaxy': 'A blink / In the silent depth of night / As the last leaf of the beech tree / As the silent tear of my love.' -- Caroline Clark @ www.gwales.com