Poetry, Geography, Gender: Women Rewriting Contemporary Wales by Alice Entwistle (review)

For a relatively small country (population just over three million), Wales has produced more than its fair share of poets. In the twentieth century, Dylan Thomas towered over his compatriots, but the other Thomas, R. S., ran him a close second, while writers such as David Jones, Vernon Watkins, Lynette Roberts, Dannie Abse, and Gillian Clarke (the latter two still living) retain their international reputations as well.

In her sparkling study of contemporary women poets in Wales, Poetry, Geography, Gender: Women Rewriting Contemporary Wales, Alice Entwistle re-animates the poetic tradition of Wales, locating the current two generations in their geographical and literary context. The theme of the book is the relationship between place, identity, and creativity: what does it mean to be Welsh in a nation that is not a state, where one can write in English or Welsh or both, and where borders—both literal and metaphorical—define and delimit the literary perspective? Entwistle writes in what is known as a post-devolution moment; in 1999, the English government, which had ruled Wales since the thirteenth century, formally devolved a number of jurisdictional operations to a separate Welsh assembly, now known simply as the Welsh Government. Though Wales lacks the full political independence of its own parliament, it nonetheless enjoys relatively wide powers of self-government, including budgetary control over the arts. For poets, writers, and creative artists of all kinds, devolution in Wales changed the landscape in which they work and therefore the type of material they produce. While Entwistle is less concerned with the politics of devolution than with the Homi Bhabha-like politics of cultural production, her discussion of the poetry is inevitably shaped by the habitus of post-devolution.

Each chapter of the book discusses the work of different poets, giving us some illuminating close readings of individual poems set in a broader landscape of biography, language, and geography. Ruth Bidgood, Christine Evans, and Gwyneth Lewis each have a chapter to themselves, while others are grouped together by the influences and genres they have in common. Gillian Clarke, Christine Evans, and Catherine Fisher share an affinity with the coastline of Wales and its proximity to Ireland, each drawing on ideas of Irish Celticity—particularly its ancient tales of voyaging saints and warriors—to create their own aesthetic space. Sheenagh Pugh, Wendy Mulford, and Zoë Skoulding use their experience of mobility and travel outside Wales to problematize the idea of Wales as a place of fixed boundaries. Mulford, for example, who was born in England, grew up in Wales, and now lives in Suffolk in eastern England, personifies the complexity of contemporary Welshness, which is less about nationality than about choice. Mulford, among others, chooses to identify as Welsh, to be what Entwistle calls “elective Welsh,” a useful formulation in an age of globalized mobility where place of birth is no longer the primary determiner of identity (p. 2).

The issue of language is, however, less easily rationalized than that of national identity. All the poets in Entwistle’s study write in English and their works, along with Entwistle’s book, belong to a well-established tradition of Welsh creative writing and literary criticism written in English. Alongside that tradition is Welsh writing—that is, writing in the Welsh language—a practice older than the historical record and one that is increasingly vibrant in modern Wales. Entwistle’s poets, then, start from a very specific location with regard to Wales as a bilingual country, writing for the most part in a language (English) that can itself cross all kinds of borders, providing a passport for its speakers. Yet Welsh-speaking Wales is its own country too, with borders that cannot easily be crossed by monolingual English speakers.

Of all the poets discussed in Entwistle’s book, only Menna Elfyn and Lewis fully articulate this tension in their work. Elfyn writes poetry in Welsh but increasingly accompanies her verse with parallel translations into English made...