No Longer Quite So Anglo - Can This Be True?

One of the great things about the Anglo-Welsh in the new millennium is that they are no longer all that Anglo although it has to be said quite a number are not that Welsh either. Emyr Humphreys, eminence grise among our English-language novelists and the man who did for the slate quarries what Jack Jones did for the industrial south, was one of the earliest to take objection to the term. He was a Welshman, he declared, not an Anglo anything. RS Thomas agreed. The fact that this fluent Welsh-speaking pair chose to write in English was a matter for them. Nothing to do with racial origin.

There, I’ve used it, that difficult word, race. Does this actually mean anything these days in Wales? The flood of new books written in English flows unabated. They are Welsh books, written about Welsh things with Welsh backgrounds, set in Wales and often displaying an entirely Welsh sensibility. But their authors were not born here. Nor were their parents. They’ve arrived ten years back, forty years back, whenever. And now they belong. The world shifts. Wales changes shape. It is how nations mature.

Edward Storey, poet of the Cambridge Fens, founder member of the John Clare Society, erudite flatlander, moved to Wales more than a decade ago and has allowed our mountainous landscape to infect his verse. His Almost A Chime-Child, from the publishers Raven Books, celebrates the Welsh landscape – hill farming, sheep, the island of Ramsey, low tide at Laugharne and gardens at Presteigne fill his clear, measured poetry. Is he one of us? He is.

John Goodby, Dylan Thomas expert and re-treader of many things from the culture of Wales was born in Birmingham and has done time at English universities before settling as Professor at Swansea. His Wine Night White from Tom Cheesman’s Swansea-based Hafan Books is not for the faint hearted. Naturally not. Goodby never is. This latest fluctuating spray of verse denial takes the reader on board with care. His opening lines are almost conventional. But wine-driven winds of change soon knock all that over. Intelligence and chance. Goodby is one of the few writers in Wales who can combine both with ease.

Nigel Humphreys, is author of The Flavour of Parallel from Arbor Vitae Press (and still they keep appearing, these new small publishers, if it wasn’t for the internet this would be a golden age). He comes from Shropshire but has spent most of his life in the coastal west. He’s learned a fair bit from the twentieth century modernists but keeps his poetry accessible. Does he belong? He does.

Checking the stacks of the newly published it’s getting harder and harder to find anything that fits the old criteria. Unless, of course, we switch languages. Which takes us neatly back to Emyr and RS. So where next?

A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail, Saturday 7th August, 2010 #159

Silver Devices

On a bench in the park sits a youth staring at a silver device. Bigger than a phone, smaller than a laptop. The sun’s up. He’s reading Dan Brown on his Sony Book Reader. The future has reached Waterloo Gardens in Penylan.

You can store a thousand titles on these slippery things, an entire library, more books than my parents ever had at one time in their entire house. More titles than my school games master read in his entire life.

They are not yet ubiquitous, these readers, but they, or something like them, will before too long. When the book is read you delete it or store it. And because of the publisher’s paranoid systems of digital rights management you can’t hand it on.

Oxfam won’t get it. The church jumble will be reduced. The second hand book trade is fast coming to an end.

There was a time when south Wales boasted scores of such stores. Backstreet warrens, market stalls. There was – and still is, because they haven’t quite vanished yet – a great pleasure in fumbling through stacks of dusty volumes hunting for bargains or enlightenment or that out of print title by Jack Jones you’d heard rumour of but never seen.

John Freeman’s vast enterprise on the corner of Bridge Street in Cardiff, more or less where John Lewis stands now, had more stock than Harrods. The place was a maze of stack, box and shelf. The owner professed an ability to locate anything instantly. Do you want to buy these paperbacked Ian Flemings, I’d ask. Nah, got dozens of those downstairs.

Nothing I ever wanted to sell ever appeared to have any value. The market, such as it was, was always for things I didn’t own. I’d drag myself back home with my box of ex-review paperbacks. I stuffed them once into a corporation litter bin on Queen Street. Left them in telephone boxes. Handed them for free to passing youths.

Today the antiquarian trade works out of web sites and auction houses. Stock is bought and sold without the trader ever having to leave his phone. On the net everything has a market value and anything is findable. Today on Abe books I located 1723 copies of things by Jack Jones. Admittedly some of them were by Jack Jones, the rhymer of cockney slang, a few were about Jack Jones the trade unionist, two were by a Jack Jones who’d written about John Lennon. But a lot were for Bidden to the Feast, Off to Philadelphia, Give Me Back My Heart and Rhondda Roundabout.

The thrill of the chase has gone. Jack is everywhere, if you want him. Although I’m not sure if he’s available yet for the Sony Reader. But I’d best check.

For those into these things the Rhys Davies Trust and the Academi have just published a free set of 16 black and white author postcards. One depicts Jack Jones. Call 02920472266 for your set.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday, 31st April, 2010. That's what the date is on my watch, a DKNY fashionista miracle.


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