Writers who have inspired me

It is true to say that my first immersion into poetry was through hymn singing. In chapel, I would become lost in the exuberance of the Welsh language as I’d read the hymns of a remarkable hymnist called Ann Griffiths. Often considered a mystic, she wrote exquisite hymns in praise of God in the 18th century. She never wrote a single word on paper and it was only after her death that  her maid Ruth, and husband, recalled her hymns and published them.

So it seemed that women could write! What a revelation to me in the male-dominated sixties I fell in love with the word power of Dylan Thomas, those difficult, intense poems about life and death. He died soon after I was born but I was mesmerised with his work as that of the poet Edward Thomas, another poet who died at an early age, at the end of the First World War. And there was yet another Thomas who influenced me, that of R.S, a Welsh priest who died a few years ago. How blessed I was that he translated a couple of my poems into Welsh!

But what of women poets? Yes, I drenched myself in American women poets, Elizabeth Bishop being one good example of a poet whose overview of the world is both vast and intimate at the same time. She may start a poem looking for her keys and end up finding continents. I relish poetry that expands our imagination. Other poets of course, became central to my reading, Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton along with American poets such as Robert Frost, Walt Whitman and William Stafford. Lorca, and Pablo Neruda were also instrumental, especially the idea of ‘impure poetry’, poetry about commonplace things. Seamus Heaney and Yeats greatly inspired my juvenilia.

I have only so far mentioned one Welsh writer as being influential to my writing but it’s true to say that  many Welsh language poets expanded my world. One such a poet was Waldo Williams who died in 1971. He went to prison on a number of occasions for refusing to pay his income tax as a protest against the warmongering of the government. He wrote a poem about two fields, about haymaking, a transcendent vision that would turn out to be a symbol of the ‘brotherhood of man’, bringing light to the world.

His work concerns light and I can’t think of a better metaphor to describe the vocation of a writer. We try to catch the light, and share the light of words, walking lightly, carrying the lantern of poetry. Leonardo da Vinci once said that the purpose of painting and sculpture was to arrive at saper vedere: to see better. That to me is what poets also hope to achieve - returning light to all who ‘enlightened’ us.

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