Diaries, Letters and Recollections

Lynette Roberts was born in Buenos Aires of Welsh family in 1909 and died in West Wales in 1995. She published two collections of poems in her lifetime, both from Faber and Faber: Poems (1944) and Gods with Stainless Ears (subtitled ‘A Heroic Poem’; 1951). She married the Welsh writer and editor Keidrych Rhys.Patrick McGuinness was born in 1968 in Tunisia. In 1998 he won an Eric Gregory Award for poetry from the Society of Authors and his work has appeared in the Independent, PN Review, Poetry Wales, Leviathan and other journals and magazines, as well as the anthology New Poetries II, edited by Michael Schmidt (Carcanet). His first collection, The Canals of Mars, appeared in 2004. Also for Carcanet, McGuinness has translated For Anatole's Tomb by Stephane Mallarme from the French and edited the prose and poems of the Welsh modernist poet Lynette Roberts. He is a fellow of St Anne's College, University of Oxford, where he lectures in French. He lives in Cardiff. In 2009 was made Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes académiques for services to French culture. His second Carcanet collection, Jilted City, was published in 2010. In 2011 he was made Chevalier des Artes et des Lettres by the French government. His academic books include Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (Oxford UP, 2000), Symbolism, Decadence and the fin de siecle (University of Exeter Press, 2000), and he has edited the Penguin Classics edition of Against Nature by J-K Huysmans and T.E. Hulme's Selected Writings for Carcanet. His French Anthologie de la Poesie symboliste et decadente is published by Les Belles Lettres (Paris, 2001).

Lynette Roberts was born into a Welsh family in Buenos Aires. Following her marriage to the Welsh writer and editor Kiedrych Rhys she moved to a cottage in the village of Llanybri a few miles from Llansteffan. Her two volumes of poetry, Poems and Gods with Stainless Ears, were published by no less a poetic luminary than T.S. Eliot when he was at Faber.Having established something of a cult following like many poets she faded from the scene until her Collected Poems published in 2006 restored her to the minds of the poetry reading public. What makes this book such a fascinating one is that it is a collection of her prose writings that gives an insight into what helped to form what in retrospect was major writing talent.The prose taking up a large proportion of the book is called A Carmarthenshire Diary and records her experiencs and thoughts of a bygone age covering the time the family lived in Llanybri. Enlivening the diary are examples of Roberts' paintings together with family photographs.In addition, there are short pieces titled 'An introduction to Village Dialect, together with pieces headed The Welsh Dragon and Coracles of Tawe, giving a fairly comprehensive picture of Welsh village life at the time. The entire collection of writings gives real insight into a serious literary figure and recalls through the pure prose of a talented writer a very different time while breathing life into characters long dead. It is a gem of a book.

• Lynette Roberts was born in Buenos Aires of Welsh stock in 1909 and died in West Wales in 1995. She published two collections of poems in her lifetime, both from Faber and Faber: Poems (1944) and Gods with Stainless Ears (subtitled 'A Heroic Poem', 1951). She married the Welsh writer and editor Keidrych Rhys, and came to know some of the prominent writers and artists her day. T.S. Eliot was her publisher and advocate. Roberts helped Robert Graves with his work on The White Goddess, and Dylan Thomas was best man at her wedding. She was a friend of Wyndham Lewis (who painted her), Edith Sitwell (to whom she dedicated Gods with Stainless Ears) and Alun Lewis (for whom she wrote 'Poem from Llanybri'), and published in a variety of magazines in Britain and America.