Hilary Llewellyn-Williams Archives

Posted on March 29, 2024March 28, 2024 by Seren Books

Friday Poem – ‘Water’ by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams

A mountain landscape beneath a cloudy sky

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Water from Spring in Saskatchewan’ by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams which features in The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems.

from Spring in Saskatchewan
for Jeanne-Marie de Moissac, and others
Water
Here they’re called sloughs, pronounced slews:
springfed pools in the vast dry dome of the prairie.
Water that stands alone, watching the sky,
that makes a print of the sky; a film
moving over its lens, with clouds
blowing out and upward, miles deep.
The earth opens, revealing the stratosphere,
the wind, the thinning air. Your face a shadow
featureless, as you lean against the light
to look in. we are blanked out by height
and depth and distance, silhouettes, little dancing sticks
on the broad flank of the world. The slough’s
view: eyeless heads and peeled limbs,
a brief disturbance of vision. The white blur
of ice is gone, snow blindness. This is spring:
reed-tips prickle its skin. Its feathers ruffle.
Ducks settle over its heart. Its water-body
contains the whole sky. Out here at dusk
you can watch darkness seep along the land,
spread over the sky like paint; you can feel
the tilt of the earth, the roll away from the sun.
a great beast turning over. The sloughs its eyes.
This one, teeming with frogs, a cacophony
of sex and ecstasy, full moon frog rave.

The grit road a pale smear, rubbed out
by coming footsteps of night. Winter is over.
The land breathes, water sees, birds meet
and couple, frogs party, sky soars, the horizon uncurls.
Soon green will spike the dun stalks. Crocus glances blue
through sagebrush. Sweetgrass. This is the eye of the world.

Posted on February 3, 2023 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘Candlemas’ by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Candlemas’ by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams from her new and selected poems The Little Hours.

This cover shows an illustration of a pagan calendar depicting the seasons. The text reads: The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems. Hilary Llewellyn-Williams.

The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems is a landmark volume which collects key poems from the career of Hilary Llewellyn-Williams, one of the outstanding poets of her generation in Wales. In addition to the classic sequences ‘The Tree Calendar’ and ‘Book of Shadows’, the book also includes ‘The Little Hours’, a sequence of new work arranged according to the traditional monastic hours. Llewellyn-Williams is one of the earliest environmental poets; her response to nature always profound, passionate and keenly observed. The Little Hours will remind readers of her many strengths and beauties and shows new readers the breadth and talent of a writer whose eye for vivid imagery and startling detail has always astounded.

Candlemas
for my father, d. 2/2/81
On Brigid’s Night
there was rain and wind and miles of darkness between us;
there was a generation of pain between us,
but I stayed awake for love’s sake, and because of the candles.
On Brigid’s Night
spring was calling a long way off, below the horizon
invisible, but heard, like a changed note;
my ears attuned, I lit candles around the room.
My children slept
upstairs, bundles of summer. I was tight-strung
and humming. Nineteen points of fire
in a small room needed watching: I sat with them.
My eyes half-closed
I watched them burn all night, watched wax spill pools
and curl and flow, the flames dip low,
wrapped round in shadows, caught in the eye of light.
The night you died
I talked to you through webs of sleep, recalling
you in my years of childhood
solid and sure, filling the fiery spaces.
I slept at last
towards dawn, in a darkened room. Slowly I woke
to sunlight striping the carpet, the cold
little heaps of wax: and my children shouting, and spring
one day nearer
and bottles clanking outside, and a sense of peace
and freedom; then the shrill cry
of the telephone, which I stumbled up to answer.

The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems is available on the Seren website: £12.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Watch Hilary reading her poem ‘Considering the World’ on our Youtube channel:

Posted on August 5, 2022 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – ‘A Flock of Young Birds’ by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘A Flock of Young Birds’ by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams from her new book The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems.

The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems. Hilary Llewellyn-Williams.

The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems is a landmark volume which collects key poems from the career of Hilary Llewellyn-Williams, one of the outstanding poets of her generation in Wales. In addition to the classic sequences ‘The Tree Calendar’ and ‘Book of Shadows’, the book also includes new work, including ‘The Little Hours’, a new sequence arranged according to the traditional monastic hours. Llewellyn-Williams is one of the earliest environmental poets; her response to nature always profound, passionate and keenly observed. The Little Hours will remind readers of her many strengths and beauties and shows new readers the breadth and talent of a writer whose eye for vivid imagery and startling detail has always astounded.

A Flock of Young Birds
for Bob Needs, i.m. Shirley Needs

Something of me, a remnant
enclosed in a little box
tucked away in the rosy earth:

yes, that dear dust, precious
stuff from the breathing body
that flourished and grew from my birth –

while you who loved me gather
around that trace of me,
remember, mourn and pray

on this gentle August day of sun and breeze.

How can I tell you now
how much I love, how happy
I am? How here, how near, how free?

Now in this summer tree
among the leaves, the light,
the webs and spiderlings, the stray bees,

I call these birds to sing that song for me.

The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems is available on the Seren website: £12.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

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