Collected Poems of Idris Davies, The

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Adargraffiad o gerddi Idris Davies (1905-1953), glöwr, athro a bardd uchel ei barch o'r Rhymni, sir Fynwy a bortreadodd galedi bywyd yng nghymunedau glofaol de-ddwyrain Cymru yn ystod yr 1920au a'r 1930au. Cyhoeddwyd gyntaf yn 1972.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

A reprint of the collected poems of Idris Davies (1905-1953), a miner, teacher and highly-acclaimed poet of Rhymney, Monmouthshire who portrayed the hardship of the mining communities of south-east Wales during the 1920s and 1930s. First published in 1972.

Dosbarthu

Byddwn yn dosbarthu eitemau sydd mewn stoc o fewn 3 diwrnod gwaith, fel arfer drwy Royal Mail Tracked 48. Ar gyfer archebion o flaen llaw, byddwn yn dosbarthu’r eitem o fewn 3 diwrnod gwaith ar ôl ei derbyn gan ein cyflenwr.

Dispatch

In-stock items will be dispatched within 3 business days, usually by Royal Mail Tracked 48. For pre-orders, we’ll dispatch within 3 business days of receiving the item from our supplier.

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

Despite a certain kind of fame, Idris Davies tends to be known for individual works: ‘Do you remember 1926?’, a poem commemorating the General Strike of that year, looks down at me from a poster on my wall as I write, and a version at least of ‘The Bells of Rhymney’ has achieved a degree of currency from the Pete Segar rendition of the 1960s. Yet such a limited view has allowed Davies to be pigeon-holed as a leftist, political, propagandist or even, (a dreaded), folk poet. He was, of course, all of these things, but what this timely re-issue of the Collected Poems , with a new introduction by Jim Perrin, reminds us is that labels are only ever half the story. This edition includes an impressive range of work from early and sometimes clunky experiments with ballad and sonnet forms and a kind of Blakean persona, to attempts in Welsh which do much to contextualise the English language verse, to examples of the influence of Yeats on Davies and his own experiences of Ireland, to late almost mystical pieces. Crucially, the edition includes in their entirety the longer sequences Gwalia Deserta (1938) and The Angry Summer (1943) from which many of Davies's well known pieces are often lifted in isolation. Their completeness admirably demonstrates the extent to which Davies is a dramatic poet rather than simply a lyric one; which is to say that no one short poem exists independently of the voices around it, and that at all times the poet is in control of this interplay. Thus, the apparent simplicity of the political message of ‘The Bells of Rhymney’ (‘And who robbed the miner?/ Cry the grim bells of Blaina’) is contextualised by the hesitant (Blakean) speaker of the proceeding poem whose political aspirations are undercut by a world of ‘tawdry advertisements’, and by the petty bourgeoisie of Cardiff, of the following poem - ‘dainty little typists and daintier little gentlemen’ who might ‘smile scornfully’ at such a call for political action just as they smile at the ‘crude accents’ of the miners on a day trip to Cardiff. Perrin, like T.S. Eliot and others before him, makes slightly troubling, large claims for Davies; claims which he knows to be provocative: better than Thomases, Dylan and R.S? But, he is right to point out that Davies’s worth is not something that should be left to literary critics to decide. This is poetry which in the best possible sense was meant to be popular; and it is also poetry which can speak to us about its time, but also about ours, as perhaps the best poetry should. This is encapsulated, for me at any rate, in a typically direct, deceptively simple utterance, exhibiting absolute control of line, in one of the Gwalia Derserta pieces: ‘It is bitter to know that history/ Fails to teach the present to be better than the past.’ A lesson which we would all do well to remember, perhaps.