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Shape of My Country, The - Selected Poems and Extracts
119 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
4 people want to read
About the author
Tony Conran
14 books1 followerHe was born in India and educated at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, where he remained as Research Fellow and Tutor in the Department of English from 1957 to 1982.
He was a man who discovered, embraced, and educated others into the full range of poetic ‘tellings’ in both English and Welsh. He spent a lifetime elasticising and making ever more permeable the borders of translation. Through such landmark works as the Penguin Book of Welsh Verse (1967) and his English opening-up of Waldo Williams in The Peacemakers (1997), he drew Welsh and English traditions into meaningful dialogue.
He was a distinguished poet and acute literary critic. From the heroic modes of the cynfeirdd to those of the Princes’ poets and the bards of the medieval nobility; from the personal and social celebrations of the beirdd gwlad and the public protests of our contemporary age to experimental verse; and from Welsh strict metres to Chinese, Japanese and Provençal models, he inhabited them all – at once naturalising them and preserving their uniqueness. Anthony Conran was both a one-man tradition and a distinctive (and distinctively shifting) voice. He was our completest poet.
Through great challenges, his humour and principled alertness never wavered. He was – to quote his own poem describing a Welsh cywydd – ‘wild with wit’.
His poem, ‘Hold me this moment’ (taken from his 1974 selection, The Spirit Level) delicately calibrates the relationship between the self, others, land, things dead and things waiting to be born:
Hold me this moment, woman
Out of whose grave sunlight
I am born. Let such mercurial
Chatterdom of finches
As domiciles your custom, lapse
For this hour, and to this blank
Marsh rededicate horizons
So that from under the bulb
The white bud may be born.
He was a man who discovered, embraced, and educated others into the full range of poetic ‘tellings’ in both English and Welsh. He spent a lifetime elasticising and making ever more permeable the borders of translation. Through such landmark works as the Penguin Book of Welsh Verse (1967) and his English opening-up of Waldo Williams in The Peacemakers (1997), he drew Welsh and English traditions into meaningful dialogue.
He was a distinguished poet and acute literary critic. From the heroic modes of the cynfeirdd to those of the Princes’ poets and the bards of the medieval nobility; from the personal and social celebrations of the beirdd gwlad and the public protests of our contemporary age to experimental verse; and from Welsh strict metres to Chinese, Japanese and Provençal models, he inhabited them all – at once naturalising them and preserving their uniqueness. Anthony Conran was both a one-man tradition and a distinctive (and distinctively shifting) voice. He was our completest poet.
Through great challenges, his humour and principled alertness never wavered. He was – to quote his own poem describing a Welsh cywydd – ‘wild with wit’.
His poem, ‘Hold me this moment’ (taken from his 1974 selection, The Spirit Level) delicately calibrates the relationship between the self, others, land, things dead and things waiting to be born:
Hold me this moment, woman
Out of whose grave sunlight
I am born. Let such mercurial
Chatterdom of finches
As domiciles your custom, lapse
For this hour, and to this blank
Marsh rededicate horizons
So that from under the bulb
The white bud may be born.
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