A collection of Lynette Roberts’s prose, this assortment relates her life in rural south Wales during World War II, offering insight into a fascinating period of history and showcasing how ordinary people’s lives were impacted by international events. This assemblage includes “Village Dialect”—Roberts’s highly original account of the genesis of poetic language—as well as her notes on her friends and contemporaries Edith Sitwell and T. S. Eliot and her correspondence with Robert Graves, for whom she helped research “The White Goddess.”

"Lynette Roberts fully deserves her restoration into the twin canon of twentieth century English-writing in Wales and of women's writing." —Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, Planet: The Welsh Internationalist


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