Rhondda Burning

With the steep-sided valley in his visual DNA, Robert Havard has developed a keen relationship between image and poetry over a lifetime of study, teaching and practice. Havard studied with two eye-opening professors, Stephen Reckert and José Maria Aguírre. He taught at several universities—Cardiff, Los Angeles and Auckland among them—before settling in Aberystwyth where the students and the wide horizons of Cardigan Bay were a joy. On retirement he taught briefly at Bristol and Cardiff, the latter closing a circle begun forty years earlier as an undergraduate.His images are processed slowly and his first collection came out in his fifties: Look up without Laughing (Gomer, 1998).As Spanish professor he focused on Lorca’s generation of poets, several of whom also painted. He learnt from these masters that for both painting and poetry it is the image that focusses the work’s power and meaning. He explored this in The Spanish Eye: Painters and Poets of Spain (Tamesis, 2007) and it is their interaction that sparks Rhondda Burning.