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School of Welsh

Reassessing Alun Llywelyn-Williams and Waldo Williams

Two of the most important poets during the second half of the twentieth-century are reassessed in two recent publications by members of the School of Welsh, University of Wales, Bangor.

Waldo Williams’s most important collection of poems, Dail Pren, was published in 1956, the same year as Alun Llywelyn-Williams's second collection of poems, Pont y Caniedydd.  Since then both volumes have established themselves as important milestones in the growth and development of modern Welsh poetry.

Inmage of Book CoverLast Christmas, Cof ac Arwydd: Ysgrifau ar Waldo Williams (Cyhoeddiadau Barddas) was published, a collection of brand new critical essays on the poetry of Waldo which was co-edited by Dr Jason Walford Davies of the School of Welsh, Bangor University and his brother, Dr Damian Walford Davies from University of Wales, Aberystwyth.  Both regard Waldo as ‘the greatest twentieth-century poet in Welsh’ and the volume contains an essay by the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, discussing the challenging task of translating Waldo’s poems into English.  The volume also contains a pioneering study by Jason Walford Davies himself of Waldo’s use of prepositions in his poems.

image of book coverProfessor Gerwyn Wiliams, Head of the School of Welsh at Bangor, has also recently published a critical essay dealing with Alun Llywelyn-Williams’s poetic response to the Second World War, a subject that Waldo Williams also explored extensively.  ‘New Territory: Alun Llywelyn-Williams and Welsh Poetry of the Second World War’ appears in The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (OUP) which is edited by Professor Tim Kendall of the University of Exeter and contains thirty-seven chapters by leading literary critics from across the world, describing the latest thinking about twentieth-century war poetry.

Gerwyn Wiliams has also been invited by the School of Welsh at Cardiff University to give the G. J. Williams Memorial Lecture and has chosen to do so on ‘Alun Llywelyn-Williams: Mapping and Occupying New Territory’.  Alun Llywelyn-Williams himself was invited to take part in the same series of lectures in 1982 and it is very apt that the creative achievements of one of Cardiff’s premier poets is discussed in this lecture.  The lecture will be delivered in Welsh in Room 1.55 at 5.30 on Tuesday, 6 March 2007.

Cof ac Arwydd is reviewed by Dr Tudur Hallam.

http://www.gwales.com/reviews/?isbn=9781900437875&tsid=6

More details regarding The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry may be found here.

http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199282661