Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 108
ISBN: 9781854112354
Publication date: December 8, 1998
Price: £6.95
Out of stock
This ‘Collected Public Poems and Gifts’ illustrates the way in which the Welsh language tradition of composition for specific occasions – weddings, funerals, births, historical public events – has influenced Tony Conran for forty years. An acclaimed translator from Welsh, Conran has adopted styles, forms and genres to create a new kind of writing in his English-language poetry. Thus Eros Proposes a Toast has formal elegies to fellow poets such as Dylan Thomas which pay public tribute in the manner of medieval bards, and poems such as ’Gooseberries’ in which a friend is remembered through the annual gathering of fruit.
It also includes a wide variety of types of poems, from ’gifts’ to friends getting married, to llatai – messenger poems – in which an animal or object communicates the poet’s feelings, to the peerless ’Elegy for the Welsh Dead’, Conran’s moving adaptation of the medieval Gododdin poem to the Falklands War. In a book which reminds us of the many roles poetry performs, Conran brings to his formal mastery an increasingly rare intelligence and humanity. Through the personal he views the universal, and with the historical he explores the values underpinning society.
Tony Conran (1931-2013)
Poet, translator, dramatist, teacher and literary commentator, much of Tony’s fifty plus year career was spent at the centre, or perhaps the interface would be a better word, of English and Welsh language cultures. Though he was never afraid to ask the awkward question, or to follow a difficult argument, he was a generous teacher, collaborator and person. His translations from Welsh poetry stretching over a thousand years were landmarks, and testimony to his ability to empathise with writers and writing across centuries of differing experiences and conditions. Tony’s own poetry was often demanding, sometimes almost mesmerising in its craft and conviction. He was able to take poetry to more places than most poets in the second half of the twentieth century, as those whose starting point was his truly memorable ‘Elegy for the Welsh Dead, killed in the Falkland Islands’ would quickly discover. Formerly The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse, Seren has expanded his selection of high quality translations in Welsh Verse, published in August 2017. A distinctive writer and critic, his intelligent contribution to the literary life of Wales will be missed.
