Street Fighting and Other Past Times – a fresh turn from a veteran of Welsh public life and culture

Adam Somerset

The inner covers of Dai Smith’s collection of fifty poems show two photographs. The first has been taken outdoors.

A young man leans against the rail of a ferry boat. The towers of Manhattan loom in the distance across the water.

The young historian has an early academic position in New York City.

The second picture on the inside front cover has an interior setting. It looks to be the kitchen of the author’s Barry home. Six decades separate the dates of the pictures.

Fruitful

The years in-between have been fruitful: historian of South Wales, BBC Cymru Wales producer, the longest-serving Chair of the Arts Council of Wales, novelist and essayist.

Dai Smith is also the foremost champion of Raymond Williams and Williams is cited from “Border Country” on the title page of  “Street Fighting and Other Past Times“

“By measuring the distance, we come home.” Home is many things.

Acknowledgements are given at the book’s close; to Peter Wakelin who has been guide to painting; to publisher Richard Davies “for giving an octogenarian a poetic chance.”

The fifty poems, between the images of the person young and less young, are a distillation of observations across public and private themes.

Appropriately Smith opens in an exchange with Peter Finch “Only poetry/ Left then/ For you/ To do.”

Death is an inevitable presence. “Taking His Breath Away” is a close-up of suffering from another time: “In Coronation Year no oxygen cylinder/ To help inflate his latticed lungs” even in a new era with “the salvation of the NHS/ Created to rid us of life’s thorns.”

The thorns may be eased but loss can still come abruptly and prematurely. “After the Appreciation” movingly remembers fellow Swansea historian Chris Williams (1963-2024).

“Memory never sleeps;/ Where the passing/ Seas of Life/ Run on through Tides of love…” “Saying Goodbyes” continues the theme. “Each goodbye a mere caesura”,/ Each one a poised parenthesis,/ Each a bridge between we made.”

Intimacy

The personal life contains lines of remarkable intimacy in “Attendance”, “Rifts”,  “Nobody’s Perfect”, “All Shucked Out”.

A historian in a frame of poetic summation cannot escape the pull of history.

David Davies of Llandinam looms over Barry.

A great match that took place in 1971 is cherished.

A sight of Jamie Lee Curtis from another age of cinema has a Caravaggio chiaroscuro of brilliance to it.

Huw Weldon and Charles Burton feature.

The fiftieth poem looks upward and outward to Wales in its entirety.

In thirteen verses the writer travels far with a pungent richness of suggestion. Smith opens with: “When the Future/ did not arrive/ They just invented/ Whatever they could.”

And verse seven: “When the past of Wales as was/ Proved too embarrassing now/ They fudged Public Memory/ Dismissed the burden of meaning. (Identity trumps culture).”

And the destiny of the author himself appears in verse ten: “They made especially for me/ One more coffin of secrecy.” From a previous poem “Unspoken discord slaps in and out over the tide’s motion” makes for a nice metaphor to accompany.

“Street Fighting and Other Past Times” is an uncommon book from an uncommon presence in Wales’ culture.

May more flow.

The book can be purchased at bookshops or direct at:

Street Fighting and Other Past Times

Dai Smith’s memoir “Off the Track” is reviewed at:

https://nation.cymru/culture/review-off-the-track-by-dai-smith/

Adam Somerset is editor of www.theatre-wales.co.uk. His book “The Wall Within” will be published in 2026.