[Tim Murphy]

I received Talking to Lord Newborough from the Alsop Press this morning. It is a book it behooves all of us to read. It is not as pretty as Words to Say, but it is a far better book. My only complaint is that the author has no evil in his heart, and I gravitate toward evil.

David Anthony turned his formidable intelligence to the writing of verse rather late in life, and this book is full of warmth, wit, and wisdom. So much for lyric verse being the preserve of the young, as John Fowles once argued. The Welsh have another Dafydd of whom they should be very proud.

[Roger Slater]

I fully agree with you, Tim, though I do think there's a wee bit of evil in some of the funnier poems in the book.

For those of you who don't have David's (Daffyd's?) first book, the good news is that this book includes most of the poems in the first book, plus many more.

[Tim Murphy]

I am in love with Wales, whose windswept coasts I have never seen. Or am I in love with the Welsh? Robert Samuel Gwynn is generations removed from that country his forebears fled, much as my forebears fled English tyranny in Ireland. I have delighted in the performances of Olivier and Burton, both Welshmen, who spoke the pentameters of Shakespeare at a level of perfection rarely achieved in the performing arts. But I know only one Welshman, David Gwilym Anthony, who left that country for England when he was a young boy, who never learned his native tongue. I do not know whether David is descended from Daffyd ap Gwilym, but he was clearly named by parents who took pride in the Bard of Wales. Here is one of his sonnets:

Talking to Lord Newborough

I’d perch beside your gravestone years ago,
a boy who thought you old at forty-three.
I knew you loved this quiet place, like me.
We’d gaze towards Maentwrog far below,
kindred spirits, and I’d talk to you.
Sometimes I asked what it was like to die—
were you afraid? You never did reply,
and silence rested lightly on us two.
These days the past is nearer, so I came
to our remembered refuge on the hill,
expecting change yet finding little there:
my village and the Moelwyns look the same,
Saint Michael’s Church commands the valley still—
but you, old friend, are younger than you were.

(Lt. William Charles Wynn, 1873-1916,
4th Baron Newborough, whose grave overlooks
the Vale of Ffestiniog in North Wales)

I don’t regard this as a good sonnet, but as a great one. It turns upside down the lines of Bob Dylan: “I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now.”

I met David at the entrance to Christ Church College at Oxford, where I was to read for the Auden Society. The following day he was the hostess with the mostest, showing me St. Catherine’s, his own college, then squiring me down to Stoke Poges, where he lives a stone’s throw away from the site where Thomas Gray wrote “Elegy in a Country Churchyard.” Gray simply had his ashes scattered on his mother’s grave, but there is an immense cenotaph where graven in marble are some lines from that masterpiece of English verse. I asked David which of his lines his parishioners would put on his cenotaph, and he blushed and said “I’ve not written any lines to be engraved in marble.” He’s wrong.

[Carol Taylor]

I'm still waiting for my copy from Alsop. I ordered it before they came out. Should I be worried?

Carol

[David Anthony]

I heard from a few people who didn't receive their order.

Robt Ward handled the publishing. He's ill at the moment, I believe, and can't be contacted, so this may be the problem.

I suggest you email Jaimes Alsop in the first instance:

alsop@att.net

I'm waiting on supplies myself, but confidently expect to receive them soon, and will be happy to send a copy to anyone whose order remains unfilled.

Best wishes,
David