Ian Gregson

This is a shorter version of a review article which appeared in PLANET (The Welsh Internationalist) magazine.

I began this book wondering how the ‘new poetry’ (as opposed to new poems) would be defined and with particular interest in the location of this proposed innovative body of work in Wales. The opening sentence of the Introduction – “Currently much of the most exciting poetry in Britain is being written in Wales.” - made the fare seem even more appetising. From this bold beginning, Ian Gregson goes on to tackle the question of definition. It has long been apparent that, with the transition from the term ‘Anglo-Welsh’ to ‘Welsh Writing in English’, there had also been a difference in emphasis and in the nature of the work produced. Gregson’s project here is to give theoretical context to that difference. ‘Anglo-Welsh’ is, for him, the ‘old’ poetry; it is essentialist in its concerns and the term itself “implies a colonial subsumption of Welshness into Englishness”. Contentious as this may be, and certainly displaying either an ignorance of, or lack of interest in, the arguments for English as a language of Wales which lay behind the definitive Garlick and Mathias anthology [Anglo-Welsh Poetry 1480-1980], Gregson’s main aim in this respect is to show how English might be creatively problematic for writers in Wales today.

One reason for his preference for ‘Welsh Writing in English’ derives from the analysis of Deleuze and Guattari based on the use of German by Kafka who was writing in Prague. English, as used by writers in Wales, is presented as a parallel case of “a deterritorialized language” thereby making the writers of Wales into an exemplar case of the post-modern condition, not quite belonging anywhere but seeking meanings where they can. If we accept that the change of term also marks a clear division between different types of writer and different values, then there is a simple distinction which can be used to judge who’s in or who’s out. But here simple also means simplistic. For a start, the two writers used by Gregson as exemplar ‘Anglo-Welsh’ poets are R.S. Thomas and Gillian Clarke. Their work is not subjected to the close analysis that is employed in the chapters on the ‘new’ poets and not a few of the quotations supplied are sourced via other critics. R.S. Thomas is challenged primarily via a critique of Kierkegaard’s notion of the heroic individual. These writers are singled out because they take an organicist position, identifying Welsh as the natural language of Wales, and using English as a medium through which to express a yearning for their true home.

So there is a clear divide between the definition of ‘Anglo-Welsh’ advanced here and one used by the main proponents of the term. There is certainly a counter-theme in the work of R.S. Thomas, which is also discussed by Garlick and Mathias, but the main difference of approach here is a move from their largely empirical approach to the matter of definition and Gregson’s approach which is more absolutist and dominated by – in many ways dictated by - the need to relate it to theory, or rather theories. So when he moves on to discuss individual poets, the constant reference points are to the extent to which each writer embodies the ideas of a particular theorist. There are, in spite of this, some excellent close readings of the work of Robert Minhinnick, who is congratulated for his ironic use of mythologised images from what is seen as ‘the Anglo-Welsh tradition’. But he is, ultimately, found to be rooted in the essentialism of that tradition.

The problem for Gregson, here, is that he finds Minhinnick adhering to a concept of Nature that he also finds in poets such as Hughes and Heaney where it “takes an explicitly pagan and problematically gendered form”, though he finds that Minhinnick “fortunately” does not follow their interest in “anthropological mechanisms”. He recognises that animist themes are “not simply a poetic technique but a strategy for arguing for the sacredness of the creatures who speak”. The interest in ecological issues and, in particular, the concern for native peoples is cited here as an example of “the globalisation of an Anglo-Welsh theme” and the interest in Aboriginal languages is seen as “anti-postmodernist” because “The post-structuralist input into postmodernism dictates that language is regarded as the opposite of natural”. While there are many contexts in which the refusal of essentialist ideas can be applauded, the use of the term (as in much current theory) as a bête noire indicating divergence from ‘dictated’ theoretical orthodoxy, seems itself to arise from an essentialism of sorts. Gregson begins from the assumption that we inhabit something called ‘postmodernism’ (without the hyphen) as if that were a state of being rather than a descriptive metaphor for certain tendencies in contemporary society. Significantly, what comes before ‘postmodernism’ is not ‘modernism’ but ‘pre-postmodernism’. But Gregson’s discussion of Minhinnick is sufficiently responsive to show the poet to be eluding such categories.

With the poetry of Gwyneth Lewis , the poet herself has identified an interest in the ideas of theorists with regard to mental health issues. Gregson acknowledges that in spite of this “key themes of Lewis’s poems can be understood without reference to such theories” but his contextualisation of them is made not so much as a thematic development as a move “beyond Lacan and into Julia Kristeva”. As far as language is concerned, this is clearly more than an incidental theme and here Gregson rather ‘shifts the signifier’ in considering the fact that she also writes in Welsh. He had earlier supplied a quotation from John Rowlands to the effect that writers in Welsh can write as if their language were a comfortable home and set that beside a suggestion that writers using English in Wales could not. In discussing the work of Lewis it is her bilingualism that is a source of discomfort, and there is a case to be made for this, but the relevance to the theory of deterritorialized language does not emerge clearly here. The discussion of Lewis’s bilingualism also tends to confuse two issues. One is the extent to which the cultural assumptions embedded in the English language affect the consciousness of those using it as monoglots. The other is the extent to which those values also seep into the use of Welsh where bilingualism and translation from English are constants. The former idea is advanced when Gregson assert s that English – or the cultural assumptions it contains – might be “ventriloquially” insinuated through the work of Welsh writers in English. It might be thought that such an infiltration, as an historical process, would have been a fait accompli long before any of the literature discussed here was written. More pertinent, in the context of the discussion of Gwyneth Lewis, is the issue of the infiltration of the Welsh language which may be ‘stolen’ in the sense that it becomes simply a translated version of English rather than a language with a life of its own, though it might be difficult for Gregson to assert such a view without falling foul of his own aversion to essentialist concepts.

Again, as with Minhinnick, I found Gregson at his most lucid when engaging in close analysis rather than developing theoretical perspectives. He shows us Gwyneth Lewis as a child stepping outside into the street and viewing her room from an unfamiliar perspective so, as she says “you are able to see your own life without yourself in it”. The image speaks for itself, but Gregson’s observation that her poems also “repeatedly ... present the familiar room and then step outside it” by shifting between registers is a useful one. After a diversion here to gloss Bakhtin’s definition of ‘heteroglossia’, what follows from this is a closer look at some poems to illustrate the point. Such pairings of the familiar and the defamiliarized provide metonymic parallels for the bilingual world occupied by Gwyneth Lewis and others in Wales.

The portrayal of defamiliarized worlds was also a feature of much of the ‘Martian’ poetry which Gregson finds to be feature of the work of Owen Sheers whom, for the most part, he finds derivatively wanting. The work of Oliver Reynolds provides further opportunity for reflections on essentialist notions of links between land and language, which he applauds Reynolds for refusing. Extended discussions of the work of Duncan Bush and Sheenagh Pugh, discover them, in different ways, to be exemplary in finding Welshness problematic, the former favouring a “restless internationalism”, the latter an “adoptive Welshness” which, however, refuses to be categorized. Stephen Knight’s surrealist perspectives, his ‘institution poems’ and his metamorphoses are seen to represent individuals subjected to processes beyond their control and therefore to inhabit the putative postmodernism in which they are contextualised. Pascale Petit’s magic realism and Paul Henry’s hesitant symbolism provide, between them, a specific context for a critique of realist modes which is implicit throughout the volume. Gregson is enthusiastic about Petit but finds Henry owing a dubious allegiance to “Dylan Thomas and his ‘Anglo-Welsh’ followers”.

The volume ends with a review of more recently emerged voices, including some interesting observations on subverted national identity in the discussion of Patrick McGuiness and alarm expressed at essentialist traits in some of the work of Sarah Corbett. So what is new? Even if the poets selected for discussion were to be accepted as a fair representation of the range of concerns, themes and styles contained in recent English-language poetry from Wales (and I imagine that some not discussed, like Ruth Bidgood and Hilary Llewellyn-Williams, would be essentially beyond the pale), much of the ‘new’ poetry seems inevitably tainted by the ‘old’. As interesting as are some of the perspectives on individual poets here, the attempt to categorize them as either ‘Anglo-Welsh’ or ‘Welsh Writers in English’ seems to me as misguided as the related tendency to use poems to illustrate theoretical ideas rather than the other way round.… (més)