Poetry review: Nôl Iaith by clare e. potter

Jon Gower

In the prologue to clare e. potter’s debut collection in Welsh she suggests the poems therein are a way of cauterizing an old wound and of dealing with the loss of not having been raised in Welsh, the language of her great grandmother. In so doing, she suggests, she somehow inserts the language back into her childhood, bestowing upon herself memories and emotions so that she can, as it were, have a second upbringing in the language.

Here are fifteen poems charged with the thrill of discovery, of finding a new language that is, in truth, a family heirloom. The poet admits they aren’t perfect but they don’t need to be, as they are tentative, exploratory, sometimes faltering first steps into writing in a second language. That uncertainty is perhaps what gives the poems their nervous energy and thrill.

The first poem takes its cue from a nursery rhyme, “Mi Welais Jac y Do” which sighting of a jackdaw with a wooden leg is sing-songed in pretty much every Cylch Meithrin in the land, along with another pre-school favourite, the jaunty “Dau Gi Bach.” This latter song tells of two little dogs who arrive home missing a shoe, an incident which incites in potter the notion that she too is searching for the metaphorical missing shoe, limping through the wood so that she can one day walk on, without obstacle. She recalls singing such songs in nursery school whilst cautioning that she was only dressing up, role-playing in Welsh, even as she thinks back to villages full of and fuelled by coal mines and the Welsh language. 

The poems in this pamphlet, graced by gorgeous cover art by Esyllt Angharad Lewis, range adventurously in theme, from searching for, and finding UFOs on Mynydd y Garth through a tender lyric about preparing for her son’s leaving home to a conventional celebration of autumnal nature. There is an account of art at the National Eisteddfod and of her vocabulary book in Blackwood Comprehensive School in 1982. potter also tells us about her first dream in Welsh and charts the sometimes tortuous route towards gaining a language. Some of the milestones on that journey appeared to her in Louisiana, when she studied for an MA in Afro-Caribbean literature and taught in a progressive school in New Orleans. Parts of the poem “Taith, Teithio – Iaith, Ieithio” are thus written in English, as in this stanza:

Years later, living two blocks from I-29, driving

a pick-up truck with A.C., hiraeth found me, pulled

me back to live along the Taff and that road

which I learned ran straight through the land

where John Tripp’s forge used to be.

Some of the poems freely mix and meld Welsh and English into a jazzy Wenglish – “gathero” for “gathering” for example – while others assert themselves in a more formal Welsh using classical or Biblical constructs such as “llanwasant” and slightly arcane idioms such as “ymhen y rhawg” , meaning for a long time. And sometimes, just sometimes, the poet feels sufficiently confident in her use of words that she can neologise, coin new words or mint them into being, such as “ieithio” and the portmanteau “cerddoroedwig’ which, in a James Joycean spirit, conflates “musician” with “wood” to describe a woodland alive with singing birds. It’s at this point that the reader wants to punch the air with happiness because it’s such a sure signal of a language embedding to the point that one can play around with it, to experiment, to literally add to the lexicon.

Emotional

Nôl Iaith is both an emotional work of language reclamation and playful celebration. Crackling with linguistic energy and full of the thrill of someone making headway in composing, thinking and adventuring in a new language, it hopefully signals the arrival of a bilingual poet. She is certainlu one with much to say, as she strides confidently forward, like someone who has just negotiated the thickets of the wood and finally found that missing shoe.

clare e. potter’s Nôl Iaith is published by Cyhoeddiadau’r Stamp. It is available from the publishers or any good bookshop.