On being a poet in Wales: Imogen Davies

Imogen Davies

It wasn’t until I spent twelve months abroad that I truly realised what it meant to be a poet in Wales.

As a Modern Languages undergraduate at Durham University, studying French, Spanish, and Catalan, I spent the third year of my degree abroad: nine months in Barcelona as an English Language Assistant for the British Council at a Catalan secondary school in the city centre, and three summer months in a small, sleepy, seaside village on the southwest coast of France, in the Pays Basque, near Biarritz, as a receptionist in a holiday resort.

I turned to poetry and writing in my journals as I came to terms with living abroad for the longest time I’d ever spent away from home. As I learned to locate myself in a foreign setting, among people who couldn’t speak my language or were even aware of the existence of my culture, I began to reflect on what it means to be Welsh, my own Welsh identity, and specifically, what it means to be a poet in Wales.

Roots

Born and raised in Aberystwyth, as was my Mam and my Nana, my Welsh identity has deep roots going back generations. I was a pupil of Ysgol Gymraeg Aberystwyth, the first Welsh primary school in Wales, established in 1939 to preserve the Welsh language endangered by the number of wartime evacuees who were relocated to the area from cities in England.

I have vivid memories of standing, shoulders back, proud with flushed cheeks, singing in the school choir for the Eisteddfod, or dressed up in traditional Welsh costume, skipping in an itchy shawl and bonnet stings tied tight under my chin, performing in the Dawnsio Gwerin.

I remember school trips to the beach, the luxury of growing up a stone’s throw from the sea, and still being surrounded by such greenery.

My childhood was spent outside stacking pebbles, digging my hands into the sand, or walking up Consti to arrive at the top and see the whole town stretching out before me. This town was my world. My pin on the map. All my family had ever known.

It was only once I’d left Aberystwyth that I felt the true tug of where I was from. It was after living in Durham as a student then spending twelve months abroad, when I returned to my hometown after graduating, to write and self-publish my first collection, DISTANCES, that I got to the root of my own Welsh identity.

Travels

DISTANCES, inspired by my travels across Europe during my year abroad, is a collection about distance in all its definitions. From ‘touching distance’ to ‘long distance’, to ‘going the distance’, to being ‘in the distance’, before present tense shifts into the past and becomes ‘distant’. The poems explore how distances define and distort relationships.

All relationships. Family. Friends. Partners. Our younger and older selves. The distance of time, of place, and of intimacy. Although I write in English, all my poems are anchored by a sense of hiraeth and my affinity with Welsh landscapes, the longing I felt for Wales and that realisation that my Welsh identity is sewn into who I am.

My Nana was a bookbinder, hand sewing the spines of books for the National Library of Wales, and although very few books are sewn together nowadays, to Nana’s disapproval of glue binding, I feel as if I am contributing to Welsh culture in the same way my Nana did, only writing on the pages she would have bound together with needle and thread.

Only since DISTANCES has been stored in the National Library of Wales’s Copyright Library, spine to spine among some of the books my nana may have bound, have I truly realised what it means to be a poet in Wales.

Inner landscape

Being a poet in Wales has nothing to do with geography.

I may have been living abroad, paying in Euros, or sitting on the right-side passenger seat in cars, sipping on French coffee as the salt of the Atlantic Ocean rolling into the Bay of Biscay dried on my tanned skin, but I was still a poet in Wales.

My bilingual upbringing in a Welsh school and growing up surrounded by Wales’s natural beauty, from the slope of the hills to the craggy coast, to the sea, has carved my mental landscape, it has become ingrained in my character, shaping how I understand the world and communicate with its people.

My thoughts and my ideas are intrinsically informed by Welsh landscapes. I look to understand my own emotions and seek empathy for what others may be experiencing through comparing it to the various landscapes of Wales. From the soft forgiving slope of the hills that invite comfort and rest. To the sharp craggy coast’s sudden shock steep drops to the sea that snatches at your breath. Or the sea’s breadth that makes anything seem possible.

I may have been a body living, breathing, unfolding movement on the southwest coast of France, but my mind was in Wales because that’s where I have been brought up, how I first learned about the world, and how I go about to understand it now. Wales never left me. Wales is my internal landscape. It has never left me. And it never will.

Mindscape

On the train from Venice to Rome

            I dreamt of home.

I dreamt of fields of pallet paint

in picket fence lines,

of quick strokes and brush swirls of quivering grass

flickering – flash –

flushing pale green.

            I dreamt of the frayed coast at sea’s seams,

of sheep punctuating the hillside

as sentences slide in rivulet streams

and shimmer lines of poetry on the water.

I dreamt of tree swollen roots stubbed by walking boots,

of paths threaded tight with sunlight,

of overcast clouds broken bright.

I dreamt of Thomas’s “bible-black” night

            as quiet clothes the town’s streets

in the soundscape of harbour boat beats

            as masts rattle

and boards creek.

            I dreamt of Wales

having only been away a week.

Imogen Davies is a 23-year-old Welsh poet from Aberystwyth. With a bilingual upbringing in Welsh and English, she went on to study French, Spanish, and Catalan at Durham University. Since graduating she has interned at Honno Welsh Women’s Press and self-published her first poetry collection, DISTANCES. Inspired by her travels across Europe during her year abroad, her poems explore human connection in the modern age, the natural world, and identity.

Her poetry has appeared online and in print in various literary magazines, such as Acumen Young Poets and the Stratford Literary Festival’s Young Poets Collection 2022.