Brazilian Blue
If I could create one tree
And hang it in the sky
And spray it with the living
Gold of the sun, and hold
The natural pattern of its growth,
I would ay that I had done
More than enough.
But observe where the sun
Has set against the black
Edge of the leaves,
How other leaves seem
To drift from one
Branch to another, or
Were they bird against
Tis darkwinged Brazilian sky!
Wings that edge the
Sao Paolo woods.
This flitting by,
This sudden appearance,
And inconsequence of time,
Is the moment I would
Hold before you;
Tomorrow evening it will
Have gone.
______________________
Collected Poems
Lynette Roberts
edited by Patrick McGuinness
Carcanet, 2005
________________________________________
The editor of this fascinating volume says it best:
"The Argentine-born Welsh writer Lynette Roberts
published two books of poems as dramatic, varied,
dense, elliptical and inset with verbal novelty as any
experimental poetry in the twentieth century. T.S. Eliot
her friend and editor at Faber, praised her work, complimenting
it by that most Eliotic of criteria: that it communicated
before it made sense." Robert Graves was also a close reader.
Wyndham Lewis drew her portrait, and Dylan Thomas was
best man at her wedding. And you have probably never heard
of her. No help from Lynette Roberts herself — in her later life
Roberts had a mental breakdown and stopped publishing; in fact
she refused to have her two books of poetry re-published when
interest arrived. Thus her work was largely forgotten and she died
a relatively unknown writer in 1995. (4 July 1909-26 September 1995).
It's her diaries I wish to find next.
[ BA ]
