Lynette Roberts (1909–1995)

Resurrected after nearly seventy years, the wartime life in Wales with her children of the Argentinian-born poet of Welsh descent was largely forgotten until the publication of her Collected Poems in 2006. She was a contemporary and acquaintance of Dylan Thomas and Eliot, who edited her works at Faber. This collection throws light on everyday wartime existence in a small Welsh village whose privations have now almost vanished from memory. Her view of the incompetence, arrogance and deceitfulness of local and national bureaucrats and politicians has lost none of its force, and forms an interesting contrast with, for instance, the wartime stories of Mollie Panter-Downes. Roberts was acutely aware of the natural world by which she was surrounded and the book is of interest for the lists of plants and birds then common in the area.

An occasional oddity in the diary entries may be due to the inclusion of later notes without an editorial mention; that for February 2nd 1941, for instance, refers to the death of Alun Lewis in Burma which didn't happen until 1944. The note concerning this event first gives the year of Lewis' death as 1955, which must be a simple typographic error.… (meer)