On Being a Poet in Wales: Tracey Rhys

Tracey Rhys

A friend recently asked if I still felt an attachment to the place I grew up, and for a moment I was thrown. Only the Bwlch mountain separates Bridgend County, where I now live, from the Rhondda Fawr where I was born. The Rhondda Fach, where I lived with my parents – where they still live, in the house they bought when Dad was working down the pit…when there was a pit – is a hop, skip and a jump away. Like a game of ladders and whip-tailed snakes, the mountains are all climb and cut around there.

Heave yourself up one road and trot like a reined pony down the sheer face of the other and you’re in your cousin’s front garden, over the other valley. In Maerdy, where I’m from, that phrase generally means anywhere in the Rhondda Fawr.

Or, if someone’s thrusting a thumb towards the sharp gradients of Aberdare mountain, it’s the Cynon. Maerdy side of Aberdare Road is where I’ve always considered the Bannau Brycheiniog mountain range to begin. All those bare undulating hills and forestry for miles…Like you’re on top of the world.

Claustrophobic

Don’t get me wrong, growing up in a little place like that can feel claustrophobic. It holds you back even as it counts you in. I got my cardis knitted by Aunty Pat, my hems hand-turned by my mother, hair permed in the bathroom sink just after my brother had his frizzed, and my make-up was free with a copy of Blue Jeans circa 1989.

But there was nothing like the sting of a day-return to Cardiff on the X8 bus to make us realise we were at least a year behind the rest of the country in fashion. And hair. And slang. Which plants this germinating seed, this stubborn little weed that won’t be dug out, no matter how many times you blitz it with affirmations, even when you get the grades you need or the job you yearn for. What if I’m just not as good as…? What if I can’t…? What if everything I say is…?

Which brings me to writing.

Being a writer in Wales means wrestling with an entire school gym full of insecurities. Because…I was never one of those netball girls who looked like the sun shone on them 364 days a year, excluding Christmas. I was predictably pale and wan with a penchant for poetry. I recited sonnets to a poster of Patrick Swayze in my boxroom while lolling against the pink artexed walls (because nothing says cwtch up now and get to sleep like an asbestos compound).

Lots of poems

I knew every poem by heart in my Golden Treasury and I decided I should probably read The Complete Works of Shakespeare if I was to fulfil my true potential. I was unsurprisingly lonely as a cloud and literally did a lot of wandering o’er hills and dales, albeit in the back seat of my dad’s Vauxhall Nova.

I watched Neighbours and Home and Away twice a day, daily – like a prescription from a malevolent psychologist. I habitually singed my fringe with a pair of curling tongs and sprayed it with hairspray until it looked like a brandy snap, minus the cream. And I wrote poems. Lots of bad poems. And my family loved them.

I cut my teeth on the writing scene in Cardiff in the late 1990s. It was a great time to be a youngster in Wales – we had Catatonia, the Manic Street Preachers, the Stereophonics, the Super Furry Animals, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Goldie Lookin Chain. The arts venues were thriving: there was Dempsey’s the pub theatre, Café Europa and Chapter Arts, of course.

By the end of my MA in Creative Writing, I’d become excited about the use of the first-person voice in writing
and had begun to write in dialect. I was now tuning into the people around me: the self-deprecating humour, the ability to laugh in the face of tough times, the storytelling, the courage and sheer bloody-mindedness.

When I became a proofreader at The Western Mail and then later a non-fiction editor, I had it in my head that working with real subjects would preserve my creative drive. There’d be room for dreaming my own fictions if I was knee deep in someone else’s reality. But nothing dries you up like eight hours of proofreading obituaries. And I should know: I’ve tried. But a wise poet once told me that every time we go through a creative block, we let our minds do their thing: listen and absorb.

Change

In Wales, every little pub or café on a wet day is a gift to a writer. Order something from the counter and listen: the hwyl, the humour, the body language, the self-deprecation, the hiss of the coffee machine, the drip of wet anoraks.

You’ll hear some of the wildest anecdotes you’ll ever hear in there, and some of the saddest stories. I often solve my writer’s block by turning up at such places. There’s no better test than to read your work silently in the corner of a busy room, where people are their most natural selves. Such a place throws up questions: how would my character, Bathsheba, interact here? What would a flood think, if it were conscious, as it filled up this floor?

With that in mind, I’m pleased to say that my loitering around cafés has finally paid off and in my 50th year, my first full poetry collection, Bathing on the Roof, is a 2025 release from Parthian Books. A lot of time has passed since I first began writing, 25 years ago, and much has changed, but Wales has never been more at the heart of my questioning: women’s experiences, the environment, Tryweryn, the Hinkley/Penarth nuclear mud dumping scandal, the Welsh ecosystem and ecology.

I still hear that negative voice from time to time, that national underdog whisper, telling me that I’m probably not good enough. But now I know…the power is in the penning.

Tracey Rhys’ debut poetry collection Bathing on the Roof is available from Parthian Books.

Tracey Rhys is a freelance writer and editor from South Wales. Her poems, stories and essays have appeared in Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review, Planet, The High Window, Dreich, Ink Sweat & Tears and numerous anthologies. A winner of the Poetry Archive’s Now: Wordview competition, her writing has been listed for competitions including the Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Competition, the Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition and the Cardiff International Poetry Competition. Her pamphlet Teaching a Bird to Sing was published in 2016. Bathing on the Roof is her first collection.