Poems and places

Women Aloud
Judith van Djikhausen, Christine Griffin, Gill Garrett,
Belinda Rimmer, Frances March, Angela France.

Last week was "one of those weeks" - when your feet hardly touch the ground and you skid from one thing to another. All enjoyable activities but no time to process what's going on and quite exhausting!

The Cheltenham Poetry Festival was as fantastic as ever, with a hugely varied programme and some tremendous poets participating. Women Aloud, the group I so value belonging to, started off the Sunday afternoon activities and we had a great, very appreciative audience. We were followed by Duncan Forbes and Ann Drysdale; Ann launched her latest publication Vanitas (Shoestring Press) last week and that's really worth investing in. My Catchword colleague Derek Healy was up next with Roy Marshall and Steve Walter; as ever I loved hearing his work, especially the poems from his collection "Made Strange By Time".  And it was back to Cheltenham on Wednesday to read with the Poetry Festival Players.  Our theme this year was "Water" and the programme encompassed  poets and topics from Shakespeare to Alison Brackenbury, The Lady of Shalott to the floods of 1947 and viewing the Severn Bore.

Then activities of a very different nature over the weekend; a Welsh learners course at Glan Llyn, the youth centre on Llyn Tegid. The saying goes of course that to be Welsh is to have poetry in your blood and music in your heart. There was certainly plenty of music, both on site and at the local pub. On Saturday morning we visited Yr Ysgwrn, home of Hedd Wynn, the shepherd poet whose poem was announced as the winner at the 1917 Eisteddfod before it was realised that he had been killed at Passchendaele six weeks beforehand. The "Black Chair" - the chair that had been draped in black as the Archdruid spoke of "the festival in tears and the poet in his grave" - is prominently on display in the house. I had visited and seen the chair a few years ago but the story bears telling many times over and the experience this time was just as poignant.

North Wales was beautiful in the spring sunshine and as inspirational as ever. There is so much history in its industrial landscapes, its towering mountains, its deep cut valleys. No wonder it has generated such a plethora of literature and poetry. This time I was very aware of the sadnesses, the injustices in much of that history, especially when standing by Llyn Celyn in the Tryweryn Valley, created by drowning the village of Capel Celyn in 1965 to provide a reservoir to supply Liverpool. Beneath the now peaceful waters lie 800 acres of land, the homes of forty eight people, a school, the chapel, post office, a Quaker Meeting House and its cemetery; the protests of every single Welsh MP, every member of its small Welsh speaking community and their neighbours could not save the village from destruction. "Cofiowch Dryweryn" (Remember Tryweryn) wrote the singer-songwriter Meic Stevens, a sentiment echoed around Wales; how much today we need to remember - and to act on that remembering - with so called "progress" threatening ever more communities and their ways of life.

Llyn Celyn