Books books books… yn Gymraeg

It's not often that I'm moved to buy a book by someone of whom I've never heard, on the strength of an academic article.

Er, OK, it is often. But I thought I'd share this one with you in the (vain?) hope that you'd go with me on this one. I've been reading Almanac (no working website), the Association for Welsh Writing in English's yearbook of essays. Amongst the many genuinely fascinating pieces is Rob Gossedge's attempt to revive the reputation of Nigel Heseltine, who I hope isn't related to the evil Tory bastard Michael.

Anyway, Heseltine was the son of monstrous Peter Warlock, an interesting composer who died early, and a difficult mother. They were the rag-ends of the Welsh squirearchy, a particularly obtuse, moronic, traitorous and unsympathetic bunch of wastrels, and its this class which Heseltine satirised in Tales of the Squirearchy, before he became a prolific translator, travel author and literary commentator.

Sounds good, doesn't it? Unfortunately, I've just spent £25 on one of only three copies available on the web, all in the US. What an undignified end to what seems like a talented life.

OK, if satirical short stories about the vanishing aristocracy aren't your thing, this might be: Fflur Dafydd's Y Llyfrgell has won the Daniel Owen Prize at the Eisteddfod. This is seriously prestigious.

The plot and setting are utterly up my street so I'll be breaking out the dictionary for this one:

a controversial novel that takes a peep into one of the major institutions of Wales, the National Library. Set in the year 2020, the novel follows a cast of characters during one dramatic day when two armed lady librarians occupy the Library.

This is a satirical novel, with a large dose of black humour, which lampoons librarians, academicians, civil servants, politicians and janitors, and throws them mercilessly together in a sinister and bizarre crisis. The novel also deals with a number of topical themes – digitisation, post-feminism, literary criticism and, most importantly, a nation’s memory and identity. The novel is an alternative view of the nation’s future, a future where women will govern; politicians overly influence the arts, and the book – and the author – are things that have been forgotten as the new technology takes their place. This is undoubtedly a challenging novel that will upset many a reader – particularly the male critic – and is certain to stimulate debate.

Like Fflur Dafydd’s other works, such as her novel about Bardsey, the novel is an amusing analysis of one of the icons of Wales, with the location itself turning into a major character during the course of the novel, as the reader sees this institution in a new and thrilling light.

To rhyme is not a crime

A while back, I mentioned that I really rated Fflur Dafydd's Twenty Thousand Saints, a radical novel set on Ynys Enlli, a prime site of Welsh religious and historical interest. I'm not the only one - she's just won the Oxfam Hay Prize. There's a little old colonialism bound up in the award though - she's an established novelist rather than a newcomer, but there's just a hint in this article that it's writing in English that matters. Even more patronisingly, the BBC story is headlined 'Singer-songwriter wins book prize'. I'm sure Dr. Dafydd will love that faintly dismissive tone…

Anyway, mention of her specialism (R. S. Thomas) reminded me that a comment on another post asked me to list and justify my favourite poets. So here we are:

R. S. Thomas. I met him a couple of times, and very unpleasant he was too. I don't agree with some of his attitudes, but I think that he's up there with the greatest poets of the twentieth century - hounded by his position as an anglicised Welsh nationalist, an agnostic vicar, a cold man with deep feelings, a radical conservative in many ways, everything is poured into poetry which is simultaneously calm and heartfelt. I have a CD of him reading many of the poems, and it's spine-chilling.

MacSpAunDay - I'm a 1930s specialist, the time when poets and artists were forced to take sides by history - often damaging their work in the process, but sometimes liberating them from the parlour games of older English literature. MacSpAunday was a sneering nickname for the leftwing, often homosexual, Oxford educated poets of the 30s: MacNeice, Spender, Auden and C. Day-Lewis.

Malory - I'm a sucker for medieval literature (and further back), especially the Arthurian romances that twist and embellish Celtic myths to deal with pressing current concerns.

Edna St. Vincent Millay: burst in on an all-male preserve, demonstrated that she could do all the strict-metre formal stuff, and turned the tables on all the poetry that objectified women as passive, sexless commodities. She's funny too.

Which leads me to Sappho - fragments of whose poetry survived because a parchment was wrapped round a mummified crocodile, 3000 years ago. Passionate, heartfelt, sometimes angry and sometimes loving and technically gifted, she really is out on her own.

She was paraphrased by Catullus - who could go from writing funny filth to passionate love in a heartbeat. I also rate Whitman, Donne, Duffy, Muldoon, and Simon Armitage, who always surprises me by conveying depths of emotion in the most ordinary of phrases, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg for their exuberance and surprising seriousness. Larkin I find interesting but can't warm to, if you see what I mean. Then there are lots of others I'm getting into slowly, like the Brownings (Robert and Elizabeth). I could go on for much longer but I have marking to do…

Into the corridors of power

I have a hotline to government - state government that is. Of Nebraska… Welcome, Nebraskan reader. I hope you've got Dick Cheney safely in an undisclosed location again!

To another reader using a Mac at Swansea University's English Department:did you Google yourself and find yourself on my page? I hope your ears (eyes?) are burning! Actually, I loved Twenty Thousand Saints: profound, funny, beautifully structured and written. How I wish I was as fluent in my first language as you are in your second.

Another day, another book

This time, it's Fflur Dafydd's Twenty Thousand Saints - partly a translation, partly a rewriting of her Welsh-language novel Atyniad. I bought it partly because I bumped into her at a conference or somewhere, while she was doing her PhD on R. S. Thomas (this book, like his Images of Bardsey) is set on Ynys Enlli, the Isle of 20,000 Saints), and partly because Welsh writing is going through another of its frequent golden ages - hip young things ripping up and remaking Cymru Cymraeg and English Wales in ever more fascinating ways, unbound by Celtic Twilightism or dour socialist realism and aided by forward-looking Eisteddfod judges.