Synopses & Reviews
Lynette Roberts, one of the lost writers of the century, is about to be rediscovered. Originally from Argentina, she moved to London in the 1930s. Much of Roberts's poetry is in almost miniaturist style and her sense of detail is seen in the deep intimacy her poetry reveals. Her experiences in Wales, England, and rural Argentina provided a unique and unusual combination of literary influences.
She was feted by T. S. Eliot, her editor at Faber, with the sort of endorsement of which poets dream. The best man at her wedding was Dylan Thomas. Her best friend in London was Sonia Brownwell, George Orwell's wife. Her marriage to Welsh poet and editor Keidrych Rhys and their move to his native west. Wales were the turning points in her writing career. The rural community of Llanybri, the countryside, marital problems, motherhood, isolation during the war all combined to forge a poetry that charts the position of women in mid-century Britain in an extraordinary manner.
Synopsis
The work of an original, haunting, and experimental modernist poet is made available again for the first time in 50 years in this volume. Lynette Roberts is principally a war poet, in that her two published collections take as their subject a woman's life in wartime. A late modernist, she works on two scales at the same time: the mythic and the domestic. As a Welsh writer, her best work stands alongside that of her near-contemporaries, David Jones, R.S. Thomas and Dylan Thomas. As a woman poet, her work bears comparison with that of both Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes.