Poetry
Gwalia Deserta
Idris Davies · 1938
Synopsis
Thirty-six numbered poems on the mining valleys of the south, in the wake of the great trade union defeat of 1926. The pits close, the men wait outside the hiring offices, the children have no shoes and the chapels empty. One poem lists the villages by name as one would count the dead. Another asks which side the men of God are on. A third makes the bells of the town speak, each demanding what it is owed.
Context
The collection appeared in 1938, twelve years after the general strike that it takes as its subject, along with the mining disasters of the same valley and the crisis of the thirties; its author writes in English about a world that spoke Welsh, saying he had lost his language at school and never recovered it to write. Two of his poems have been set to music and sung around the world without anyone knowing where they came from: an American singer had found the first in a book by Dylan Thomas, and a rock group took it up again twenty years later.
Who it is for
About sixty pages in English, never translated. The poems are short and without difficulty; it is better to know what the 1926 strike was.
Prizes and reception
Two poems that became songs sung everywhere, most of the time without their author's name.