Shards of Light

Emyr Humphreys

Description

Shards of Light is a collection of previously unpublished poems by Emyr Humphreys. Now in his hundredth year, he has been described as Wales’s foremost novelist of his generation. This newly discovered collection of poems has all the sharpness and incisiveness of thought as if they had been written today. Humphreys scrutinises life with a wry humour, coloured by the experience of his great longevity and grounded in Wales. With a sharpness of thought and a sparseness and frugality of expression – a hallmark of his work – the poems contain a profundity which challenges us to think more deeply about the nature of our being. They fearlessly ask difficult questions of ourselves as to the nature of being within the vastness of creation. The subjects are as varied as is man’s experience, from the vastness of time, space and God’s power, to musings on everyday life leading to old age. Ultimately the reader will find the experience entertaining yet deeply felt, satisfying and rewarding.

Sujets

• Poetry

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786833525
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

SHARDS
OF LIGHT
SoL.indd 1 08/10/2018 08:06:12Writing pages:Layout 1 23/6/09 13:39 Page 291SHARDS
OF LIGHT
Emyr Humphreys
UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS
2018
SoL.indd 3 08/10/2018 08:06:13© Emyr Humphreys, 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form
(including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether
or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without
the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s
written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to
the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff
CF10 3NS.
www.uwp.co.uk
Shards of Light
by Emyr Humphreys
poems collected and edited by Dewi Humphreys
cover image by Guto Humphreys
British Library CIP Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78683-351-8
eISBN 978-1-78683-352-5
The right of Emyr Humphreys to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The publisher acknowledges the fnancial support of the Welsh Books Council.
Typeset by Marie Doherty
Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Melksham, Wiltshire
SoL.indd 4 15/10/2018 12:29:02CONTENTS
Introduction xi
M. Wynn Thomas
SHARDS OF LIGHT
We are old age 3
Scratches on stone 4
Bluebells 5
The Funny Bone 6
Childhood 8
Lament for a game of Cowboys and Indians 9
Recollections of Nant Mill 10
More mice than men 11
‘Cousin Swift you will never be a poet’ 12
Job Creation 13
Steel 15
The Art Critic 16
Transparence 17
The Letter Writer 18
Love Song 19
SoL.indd 5 08/10/2018 08:06:13Silence 20
Civil Unrest 21
Battlefeld 24
A Clergyman Muses 26
Poughkeepsie 28
Bird on a Twig 30
Solomon Smiles 31
A Day in Hand 32
Manawydan 33
The Peasant 35
A Dog’s Life 36
To the Sea in a Sieve 37
Sacred Tree 38
The Courteous Dig 39
Wm. Jones Tremadoc 40
Nostalgia 41
The Damned 42
Nid talwrn yw’r byd 44
A Moth at St James’s 46
Brotherhood 48
Jacob’s Coat 49
The Dead 50
Wise Man 52
Jews 53
SoL.indd 6 08/10/2018 08:06:13Terror 54
Sunday School 55
The House Husband 56
John Elias 1830 66
Making butter – old style 67
The Art of War 69
Marvao 2 70
The Colonel’s Wife 71
Rooftop 73
The Best-Selling Poet 74
Montale Cabinera 75
Survival 76
The Boat 77
More 78
Negative Sermon 82
The Bard 83
Notes on a Page 84
Whispers 85
The Geese of Time 91
Provincial Song 92
Recipe for a Poet 93
Where they are gone 94
A Blessing 95
Wealth 96
SoL.indd 7 08/10/2018 08:06:13Don’t rush 98
Novelist’s Notes 100
From a Far Country 101
Etruscan Shadows 102
Gododdin 103
Picking up signals 104
The Sag in the Cloth 105
Holy Orders 107
Giving Up 109
The Thirties 110
Elinor getting on 111
Making a Difference 112
Hitler 114
Dictator 115
The Same Old Story 116
First Winter 117
A Political Cry 118
Freedom 119
Hen Gerdd 120
Limp between two languages 122
Lines on an Unsuccessful Politician 123
Poets in Orbit 124
To whom it may concern (1) 125
Ty concern (2) 126
SoL.indd 8 08/10/2018 08:06:13A time before 127
Age 128
Belief 129
Governing Class 130
Floor Litter 131
Battling with the Ego 132
Homework 133
In Lazio 134
Infammatory Stuff 136
Two of Everything 137
Alternative Routes 138
Being Rational 139
Domestic Scene 140
EP 141
Paddington 143
A V otive Moment 144
Another Route 145
Computing 146
Dictionaries 147
Everyone 148
A Rehearsal 149
An Actress 150
Agostino 151
The Stable 152
SoL.indd 9 08/10/2018 08:06:13Honesty 153
Living In 154
Syllables 155
Taking Off 156
The Secret 157
The Fly 158
An Open Secret 159
The Marble T omb 160
Bones 161
Lovesong 162
The Shadow Falls 164
Evening 166
Why water won’t bend 167
Ultimate Discoveries 168
Youth and Age 170
Triumph of Old Age 171
The Old Couple 173
SoL.indd 10 08/10/2018 08:06:13INTR ODUCTION
t is twenty years since I assisted Emyr Humphreys in preparing his ICollected Poems. He had already reached his eightieth birthday, and little
did I then think that over the following two decades he would somehow
succeed in producing another set of powerful poems that would merit
publication to celebrate his hundredth birthday.
Emyr Humphreys: novelist. Obviously. Over a writing career spanning
some sixty years he has published more than two dozen novels, several of
them award-winning and including both the greatest English-language novel
yet written about Wales (Outside the House of Baal, 1965) and a remarkable
defnitive sequence of seven novels encompassing the ‘Welsh
experience’ throughout much of the twentieth century (The Land of the Living,
1971–91). There are, therefore, few who would be inclined to dispute that
he is modern Wales’s most distinguished writer of fction.
But Emyr Humphreys: poet? Such a description is very likely to raise
eyebrows, and yet it was the aspiration to be a poet that frst prompted him to
become a writer, way back at the end of the 1930s. Indeed, his best-known
novel (A Toy Epic, which won him the prestigious Hawthornden Prize in
1958) had actually started life two decades earlier as the beginnings of a
long autobiographical poem. Moreover, when his striking poetic sequence
entitled Ancestor Worship appeared in 1970, it was immediately evident that
in Humphreys post-war Wales had a poet of truly original, indeed singular,
talent. His was a kind of poetry totally unlike that of any of his
contemporaries. And the poems in the present volume continue to arrest, and indeed
to startle, precisely because they are so unusual.
In some cases, their unorthodox character could clearly be said to owe
much to Humphreys’s gifts as a novelist. In shrewd social portraits, such
as that of an old Italian peasant woman’s bewildered dislike of her
aggressive daughter-in-law, can be discerned the same qualities that make his
novels so distinctive. They are unsparing in their dispassionate dissection
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of character and situation. He has always been mindful of the observation
of his early mentor, Graham Greene, that a novelist should retain a chip
of ice in the brain.
Humphreys’s poems are characterised by their cool, measured
calibrations of experience. His is a poetry characterised by an absence of
ego-concern and a willingness to recognise that one’s own face is simply
one in an infnite ocean of faces. Just as anyone’s merely human being is an
insignifcant existence amidst the irreduceable ‘otherness’ of an
unimagineably vast, mysterious universe, although it is none the less remarkable and
precious for being so:
Ultimate discoveries
Are made in winter
Snow on the piste
And galaxies piercing the sky
Pin pricks in the velvet
Choreograph small lives
It is under such conditions that one perceives
a spider’s thread
Of existence suspended
Like a piece of debris in outer space
That intermittently catches the sun
And threatens the sky with
The glitter of inexplicable messages.
From time to time there shyly surfaces an awed acknowledgement of
a dimension of reality forever beyond human comprehension, one that is
sometimes to be intuited haunting the limits of language and feetingly
manifest in the non-human world. ‘Grass in all its forms,’ he writes, ‘Insists
on singing just as / Nettles sting,’ and, for Humphreys, palpably evident in
creation is the ‘votive urge towards eternity.’ In the face of that which will
never yield to the importuning of language, Humphreys has always
recognised himself in Wittgenstein’s strictures on the need to keep silent. And
his repeated vulnerability to wonder, even in extreme old age, is constantly
xii
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moving. ‘Blood,’ he writes, ‘Provides me with / An indefnable rejoicing /
But no words yet / To encompass the explosion.’
Like his great long-standing friend R. S. Thomas, Humphreys is
convinced that poetry can take us closest to whatever ultimately is, and in one
of several poems addressing the unique modus operandi of poetry, he has
noted how
Between words as between lovers
There are hesitations that
Mean as much if not more
Than the coloured links
In the chain
He is accordingly spare in his deployment of language, and many of the
poems are so cerebral and condensed, and so lapidary, that they seem to
aspire to the condition of epigram. The writing undoubtedly owes
something to that of such admired Italian models as Montale, and above all to the
lucid complexities of the sublime Dante of whom Humphreys is a devoted
reader. But it is also reminiscent of the great pithy poetry of the Welsh
strict-metre tradition, which, like that of Humphreys, can sometimes be
suggestively riddling.
Although his visits to the past are remarkably restrained, for one of such
advanced years (‘All that afternoon I lived / in the nineteen thirties . . .’),
episodes from his large storehouse of experiences are occasionally clearly
recycled in a compendious poetry that is thus able to apprehend refugee
experience, the malign power and appeal of dictators, the fragile egos
of the acting profession, the scholarly devotees of Etruscan remains, the
contemporaneity of legends from the Mabinogion. On some subjects,
such as the obsession with wealth and power, Humphreys is coolly tart.
But wry and scathingly sardonic though he can be – a reminder that in
his fction he is a frst-class satirist – he is never merely cynical or sour.
And only very rarely, in his darkest hour, does he confess to knowing the
temptation to despair.
Most affecting, however, is his short, heart-breakingly equable
meditation on the loss of his wife and beloved soul-mate, Elinor, at the end of
sixty years of married life:
xiii
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And in this only lies our hope
My dear our so called undying affection
Is the mote in the beam
Of this love that controls the planet
And holds the sun in its pl