'Between now and then, I will offer youA fist full of rock cress fresh from the bankThe valley tips of garlic red with dewCooler than shallots, a breath you can swankIn the village when you come. At noon-dayI will offer you a choice bowl of cawlServed with a 'lover's' spoon and a chopped sprayOf leeks or savori fach, not used now,In the old way you'll understand. The dinOf children singing through the eyelet shedsRingi...

The work of an original, haunting, and experimental modernist poet is made available again for the first time in 50 years in this volume. Lynette Roberts is principally a war poet, in that her two published collections take as their subject a woman's life in wartime. A late modernist, she works on two scales at the same time: the mythic and the domestic. As a Welsh writer, her best work stands alongside that of her near-contemporaries, David Jones, R.S. Thomas and Dylan Thomas. As a woman ...