A brilliant and canny poet of love.
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Unless She BeckonsPoems of Dafydd ap Gwilym
presented in Welsh and English Translated by
Paul Merchant and Michael Faletra The greatest poet of medieval Wales.
A brilliant and canny poet of love, Dafydd ap Gwilym explores the intensity of erotic desire: its deep seriousness as well as its deep comedy. Although distant in time and circumstance, Dafydd’s work confronts us with a virtuosic strangeness, a directness, and a sense of lived realness. In his poems, he lingers outside a village, loiters in the woods waiting for a tryst that never happens, peers through a window, stumbles in the dark. Despite the centuries and the technological gulfs that separate us, Dafydd’s world is also our world, and his poems, like the best of all poetry, surprisingly modern. With a voice coy, confident, and continually alluring, his poetry beckons and endures.
MARY SZYBIST, National Book Award winner, on “The Mist”
When the speaker can no longer physically move forward toward consummation with his beloved, a space is created in which the imagination runs loose. The language itself becomes a kind of mist: one astonishing metaphor after another comes rushing at us.
—The Writer’s Notebook II (Tin House Books 2012)
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About the Translators
Paul Merchant was born in Wales and taught for many years at Warwick University. Since 1988 he has lived in Oregon, where he was Director of the William Stafford Archives in Watzek Library at Lewis & Clark College. His volumes from Five Seasons Press include Bone from a Stag’s Heart (1988 Poetry Book Society Recommendation), Some Business of Affinity (2006 Oregon Book Award finalist), and Bread & Caviar (2016). His translations from Greek, Modern Greek, Latin and Welsh have been published by Five Seasons, Trask House and Tavern Books.
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Michael Faletra is Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, where he specializes in the literatures of medieval Britain. He is the author of Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination and the translator of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of
the Kings of Britain. |
