Poems by

Rowen Brittany

For those who don't know the country, Wales is easily caught in cliché's - Snowdonia (though we call it Eryri and the mountain Yr Wyddfa), coalpit valleys, cold chapels, male voice choirs and ladies in tall black hats. Or maybe Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey and men in red on the 6 Nations pitch.

They are all part of a pride grown like a carapace over centuries of ridicule and prejudice from a nation who stole the land and tried to eradicate its culture. But these simplicities do not fit the country today. 

The decline of the chapel, the disappearance of old industries and, of course, the violent destruction of 'King Coal' tore the heart out of many Welsh communities leaving crime, violence, despair, cross-generational  unemployment and poverty. It's a Wales somewhat distanced from Dylan Thomas or druid-clad eisteddfodau. But poetry is alive and well in Wales, it has endured centuries of despair. Rowen Brittany is a Welsh poet based in Bristol. Her poems tap that darker reality but the traces of rhyme and cynghanedd are there. I bumped into Rowen at the Laugharne Weekend, the annual three day festival of literature, comedy and music in the town made famous by Mr Thomas, and was determined to get her onto the Portsmouth Poetry website. She is a talented and passionate writer, as the raw honesty and pain of these examples of her work show. 'Shakespeare sux' is a perfect expression of the frustration many pupils endure being force fed the classics in school (the subject of our 'Power of the Beat' project). I love the internal rhyme in "the soft woe is me type of imagery in the form of buttercup honey dew simile". National frustration is vented in 'EngErLaNd' for centuries of misuse at English hands in, for example, the lines "why cant you speak it well /  tongues and hands were tied / Knotted and forgotten with each conquest"  and I'm pretty sure Rowen is cleverly playing with the word knot both to reference the subjugation of the Welsh and the two hundred year practice of the 'Welsh Not' in which children as young as five in schools were humiliated and beaten for speaking their native language. All the voiceless youthful misery and frustration in Post-Thatcher Wales is captured perfectly in the closing line of  'lifeinsouthwales' - "experienced south welsh happiness pit valley shit / feel like i dont have any words left / at least any words worth it "  Grief is one of the oldest human sufferings and so a frequent subject for poetry. Though no less painful or pertinent for its recurrence it is hard to imagine another poem could bring anything new to over-stated tragedy but Rowen does. Birdsong is a poignant counterpoint to the rough urban setting of  part 2 and, yes, how many poets have noticed the guilt at the heart of grief?  'Soliloquies', a hard look at the rough realities of Dylan Thomas's 'ugly lovely' town today begins with a nod to Ginsberg's classic 'Howl' and lays out its harshness with the same gritty honesty and a clever reference to ancient Welsh history at its close. 'muse for a minute' is a necessary rant against men - and the line "now im just a girl in your gaze"  is a wonderful understated summary of how women are treated every day both as objects of lust and as something not significant! Social divisions today have taken on new forms and in the myth that class and inequality don't really exist anymore they have adopted new dimensions of arrogance and dismissal. 'Gentrification cru' is marked by its restrained vitriol nicely embodied in the dichotomy between a £6 sourdough (both financial distance and status consumption) and a homeless man. These are powerful testing poems that push the reader to acknowledge that life isn't always easy but with the reassurance that poetry truly is alive and there in everything except prose!

Josh Brown