In his account of ‘perhaps the high point’ in Roy Jenkins’ many decades near the top of British politics – his success for the SDP at the Glasgow Hillhead by-election in 1982 – John Campbell remarks that it was a tricky campaign for an ‘anglicised Welshman’ with no Scottish connections. In a large volume running to more than 800 pages this is one of only a handful of references to Jenkins’ Welsh roots. Another comes when Campbell discusses his writing style, for as much as a leading politician Jenkins was a journalist and biographer, earning more by his pen than by holding great offices of state in London and Brussels. Campbell says that Jenkins thought in images rather than ideas which, he suggests, was a weakness and which he attributes to his Welshness: ‘A facility with images seems to be a peculiarly Welsh characteristic, exemplified by those other great Welsh orators Lloyd George and Aneurin Bevan.’ ...
Poets’Graves/Beddau’r Beirdd is the product of a second collaboration between poet and critic Damian Walford Davies and photographer Paul White. Black-and-white photographs of graves or burial sites are faced by parallel stanzas in English and Welsh. This is a tri-authored book, with Mererid Hopwood providing the Welsh text, but one senses that Davies is the prime mover and the dazzling tour de force of an introduction is his. It leaves the reader under no illusion as to the putative intellectual significance of the work; no mere highbrow coffee table book, this. Here is a taste: ‘Our own stanzas of the graves – located in deliberately unfixed space between prose and verse, sepulchrally quadrilateral on the page – are meditations on the problem of writing the poet’s grave … The literary texts in the present volume can be seen as curiously doubled epitaphs – written (or spoken) palimpsestically on or around or near an existing epitaph or other inscription … it amounts to … a necrological literary criticism.’ Sober analysis is not the most fitting response to the playful ingenuity on display here. Applaud, rather, the brio which drives the project.
There is a passage in this novel where it is said of one its characters that he had a strange sense of time, ‘not as a thing you live within, but as an element you grow alien to when you become aware of it’. It is very much a part of the experience of reading the novel that its language shifts the reader perceptually away from the role of consumer – the recipient of an engaging narrative – to that of a witness struck as much by the words which tell the story as by the events narrated. This is achieved by an intentional naivety of style in the telling, and recreates the text itself as something imposing an awareness of its difference, much like that strange sense of time as an alien element ...
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