Reading for Wales

Hiatus through some very intriguing months. Here I am staying in the Wye Valley under the Black Mountain and treating myself to a glut of Welsh writers. Some I have known and loved for years, some I have just discovered and intend to reread.

 

I began with Jan Morris, half-Welsh and a superb travel writer. The Matter of Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country is a great introduction to the spirit and culture of Wales, the history and  regional diversity. Then I had a zoom through Raymond Williams’ What I Came to Say, his collected essays on culture and class with some references to the Welsh Borders he loved so deeply. The son of a railwayman at Pandy who went to Cambridge and revitalised literary criticism. I’m hoping to get my hands on a copy of Dai Smith’s new biography of Raymond Williams. Smith spoke at the Hay festival this year on the lyric beauty of Raymond Williams’ writing in Border Country, one of his few novels.

 

 

There is a lurid John Cowper Powys next to the loo to be looked at, along with Arthur Machen. I skimmed through Fiona MacCarthy on Eric Gill and only really read the chapter on Gill’s stay up at Llanthony Abbey near Capel-y-Ffyn. Such a brilliant and amoral artist, the beautiful lettercutting in stone, magnificent typography, but neither his daughters nor the sheep were safe from him.

 

Then to Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography of Bruce Chatwin, prior to reading Chatwin’s On the Black Hill. Chatwin stayed with Diana Melly in her isolated tower near Usk as well as with Penelope Betjeman at New House high above Hay-on Wye.

 

Haven’t yet found anything by the National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke, but I do have Owen Shears’ Resistance, set in a valley near here. And then there is the fey Methodist hymn writer and mystic Ann Griffiths and earlier Welsh authors — the letters and journals of the Ladies of Llangollen. Celtic poetry. Legends of white ladies and lakes, dragons and islands that vanish in lakes, histories of Owen Glendower and the magician Taliesen,  Merlin and the court of King Arthur.

 

Along with books on Welsh cooking, histories of Ludlow and Hay-on-Wye, not forgetting Dylan Thomas. Can I really face that overwrought contrived density again?

 

Well, braced with Barra Brith tea cake and elderflower cordial I shall try my best…