Letter to the Dead

‘Between now and then, I will offer youA fist full of rock cress fresh from the bankThe valley tips of garlic red with dewCooler than shallots, a breath you can swankIn the village when you come. At noon-dayI will offer you a choice bowl of cawlServed with a ‘lover’s’ spoon and a chopped sprayOf leeks or savori fach, not used now,In the old way you’ll understand. The dinOf children singing through the eyelet shedsRinging smith hoops, chasing the butt of hens’Lynette Roberts is one of the most astonishing and brilliant poets of the twentieth century. Though published by T.S. Eliot and Faber in the 1940s and ’50s her work unjustly fell off the radar for many years until the groundbreaking edition of her collected poems published by Carcanet in 2005. Twenty years on, this new edition contains an additional sixty-five previously uncollected and unpublished poems by Roberts, and a new epilogue highlighting her growing importance to our understanding of twentieth-century poetry.