Friday, March 19, 2021

RE-READING LYNETTE ROBERTS ~

 




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 ]