Broke my heart into a thousand birds

 

The woman poet, mystic, writer in a time of war. The woman who has bonded with nature staring into the machine, the furnace of bombing.

I’m thinking of the extraordinary and almost forgotten Welsh poet Lynette Roberts.

“She danced me to the edge of the cliff 

Broke my heart into a thousand birds

And then leaping off without a word 

She taught them to fly.”

 

She was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1909 into a Welsh expatriate family. She comes to London as a young woman to study at the School of Arts & Crafts, then moves to Wales to paint and write poetry. She marries the poet Keidrich Rhys and  lives in Llanbri. She is attracted to the war poet Alun Lewis. Robert Graves dedicates The White Goddess to her because she has provided much of the Welsh mythological material.

She has a juicy sardonic tongue, a quick grasp of the passionate war between men and women, women and the machine. She looks back to the Modernist Mina Loy, a bohemian woman poet eking out a living on the Left Bank of the Seine, to the lyric visionary HD, to impoverished alcoholic Hart Crane dreaming of bridges, city towers and ocean crossings, to the Mabinogian. She is Other, a foreigner who still thinks in hot-blooded Spanish as a mother tongue. She is Welsh to the bone, to the marrow.

If you come my way that is . . .
Between now and then, I will offer you
A fist full of rock cress fresh from the bank
The valley tips of garlic red with dew
Cooler than shallots, a breath you can swank

in the village when you come

She is writing and  suffering in Wales through the Second World War. Children from the East End of London have been evacuated out of the Blitz to village homes and there is no room to take in Welsh children once Swansea is bombed. She hates the English, her poem’s hero airman is Jewish.  She sees Swansea blazing on the horizon. Her life is ‘dylanesque’ by which she means poverty-stricken.

Her lover is away at war. Men fighting dying, crashing, burning. While she sits over a Singer sewing machine:

Sandals and swimsuit lungs naked to the light,
Sitting on chair of glass with no fixed frame
Leaned to the swift machine threading over twill:
‘Singer’s’ perfect model scrolled with gold,

Chromium wheel and black structure, firm on
Mahogany plinth. Nails varnished with
Chanel shocking! Ears jewelled: light hand
Tipped with dorcas’ silver thimble tracing thin
Aertex edge

She writes of the gleam of chromium, of ’sprockets of kale’, she links birds, planes and angels as mechanized hybrids. She entitles her great Modernist war epic Gods with Stainless Ears. Her metaphors are cinematographic, archaic, alienated. A woodpecker becomes a dragon becomes a helicopter. Who in post-war Britain could hear this new bright voice, glittering with cognitive dissonance and anguish? She stands at the burning point where myth encounters the futuristic, the hillside rendered soulless. Scenes and visions jitter before her eyes like a newsreel.

 

In 1956 Lynette Roberts is hospitalised with a nervous breakdown and diagnosed as schizophrenic. She lives in poverty around Carmarthen Bay near Swansea, repeatedly hospitalized, until her death in 1995. She has become a Jehovah’s Witness and is shunned by her neighbours. In her last months, she speaks in Spanish and nobody can understand her.

To-day the same tide leans back, blue rinsing bay,
With new beaks scissoring the air, a care-away
cadence of sight and sound, poets and men
Rediscovering them. Saline mud
Siltering, wet with marshpinks, fresh a slime stud

Whitening the fields, gulls and stones attending them;
Curlews disputing coverts pipe back; stem
Plaintive legs deep in the ironing edge, that
Outshines the shale, a railway line washed flat,
Or tin splintered from a crab-green cave.

This is Saint Cadoc’s Day. All this Saint Cadoc’s
Estuary: and that bell tolling, abbey paddock
Sunk. – Sad as ancient monuments of stone.
Trees vail, exhale cyprine shade, widowing
Homeric hills, green pinnacles of bone.