Past Syrian Juniper and tall grass;
Hanging with dark secrets the Brewer's spruce;
The pond that drew the young child in;
Among darkening leaves: a nightingale
Sobbing in the sunniest season,
'My love, my Love, why do I love another?'

To the green wood where I found my love;
To the green wood where I held my love;
To the green wood now my love is gone.

From 'These Words I Write on Crinkled Tin'

The work of an original, haunting and experimental woman modernist poet is made available again, for the first in 50 years. Lynette Roberts is principally a war poet, in that her two published collections take as their subject a woman's life in wartime. But she is also, or therefore, a love poet and a poet of the hearth. A late-modernist, she works on two scales at the same time: the mythic and the domestic.

Those poets and readers who have valued Roberts' work have been experimentalists. Even at this distance, she challenges and instructs, at the level of diction, syntax and achieved form. She relentlessly opens out the language of poetry, she is free with extremes of subject, scale and conception, and her work has flourished in its very marginality. Now, with republication, she is restored as an extraordinary poet in the development of twentieth century British poetry. As a Welsh writer, her best work stands alongside that of her near-contemporaries, David Jones, R.S. Thomas and Dylan Thomas. As a woman poet, her work bears comparison with that of both Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes.

Preface by Angharad Rhys
Introduction by Patrick McGuinness

Poems (1944)
Poem from Llanybri
The Shadow Remains
Plasnewydd
Low Tide
Raw Salt on Eye
The Circle of C
Lamentation
Broken Voices
Earthbound
Spring
Rhode Island Red
Ecliptic Blue
Poem [We must uprise O my people.]
Woodpecker
Curlew
Moorhen
Seagulls
Fifth of the Strata
Thursday September the Tenth
House of Commons
Crossed and Uncrossed
The Seasons
Orarium
In Sickness and in Health
Blood and Scarlet Thorns
Rainshiver
Royal Mail
The New World
Argentine Railways
Xaquixaguana
River Plate
Canzone Benedicto
Cwmcelyn
Notes on Legend and Form

Gods with Stainless Ears. A Heroic Poem (1951)
Preface
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V

Notes

Uncollected and Unpublished Poems
To a Welsh Woman
Song of Praise
Poem [In steel white land]
Englyn
Green Madrigal [I]
Transgression
The Hypnotist (Welsh Englyn)
Love is an Outlaw
These Words I Write on Crinkled Tin
Two Wine Glasses
Ty Gwyn
The 'Pele' Fetched in
A Shot Rabbit
Llanstephan Madrigal
Displaced Persons
Saint Swithin's Pool
Brazilian Blue
It Was Not Easy
Chapel Wrath
Trials and Tirades
Angharad
Prydein
Out of a Sixth Sense
Green Madrigal [II]
Premonition
Mockery
Red Mullet
The Tavern
The Temple Road
The Grebe
He alone could get me out of this
The Fifth Pillar of Song
Bruska's Song
Pendine
Release
Downbeat

Appendix
Radio Talk on South American Poems
El Dorado (1953)
Patagonia (article published in Wales, V, 7, Summer 1945)

Notes
Index of First Lines