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Lygad yn Llygad

This collection of 125 public and private poems represents the poet’s creative engagement with mainly contemporary episodes of both local and global significance, encompassing the cultural, political, environmental and familial. Among the themes explored are the complexities of personal relationships, parenthood and questions of communal and national identity. The tone of the poems is on the whole life-affirming, tempered by a keen awareness of the fragility of a minority language and culture and, more broadly, of the transience of the human condition. Not all poems are written in the strict-metre cynghanedd of Wales’s bardic tradition, yet the collection as a whole has a very ‘bardic’ coherence. It is underpinned by textual and literary scholarship: the poet is also a literary historian and an experienced editor of Welsh(-language) medieval strict-metre verse. As such, the collection knowingly explores the twenty-first-century valency of the forms, generic conventions, diction and performative dimension of the historical tradition, particularly its elegiac and satirical modes and the discursive culture of the talwrn. The same reverential playfulness is evident in the poet’s experimentation with cynghanedd: he achieves a fluency and ease of diction (even in his bilingual Welsh/French englyn) that is rarely found in the work of contemporary exponents of strict-metre verse.This is a thematically and stylistically diverse collection of poems in both strict- and free-metre form. There is considerable metrical variety, the predominant forms being the cywydd and englyn metres and the sonnet. This volume substantially builds on individual previously published poems: the number of poems published prior to 1 January 2008 comprises 17.6% of the whole collection.