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Waldo Williams (1904–1971)

Author of Dail Pren

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Works by Waldo Williams

Associated Works

The old farmhouse (1953) — Translator, some editions — 11 copies
Geiriau a gerais (2006) — Contributor — 2 copies

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In Two Worlds

Môr Goleuni/Tir Tywyll Waldo Williams
Images by Aled Rhys Jones Edited by Damian Walford Davies

In his poem ‘Geneth Ifanc’ (Young Girl), Waldo Williams refers to “the unseen and the timeless house” becoming firmer because of his bringing to life in imagination of a girl buried over 4000 years earlier and preserved as a skeleton in a museum at Avebury, Wiltshire. Both in his poetry and in many prose pieces (the latter also collected in a useful edition by Damian Walford Davies) he refers frequently to the interaction of the visible and the invisible world. Not for him the absent God, but one who was tangibly present, though characterised as an ‘outlaw’, an ‘exiled king’, an inhabitant of another world. For Waldo Williams the right way to live was to make that invisible world present, and he believed that it was possible to do this. In such a view we are not irredeemably fallen; there is, as the Quakers have it, ‘that of God in everyone’. But at the same time the characterisation of God as the outlaw and the exile suggests that we don’t maintain these connections between the worlds. As Damian Walford Davies points out in his foreword, Waldo’s poetry is one of oppositions, the title of the book under review (Sea of Light/Dark Land) being just one, and the pairing of words and images in the volume reinforces that effect.

The book’s title is taken from the poem ‘Mewn Dau Gae’ (In Two Fields). The images conveyed reflect the words of the early Quaker George Fox who spoke of an ‘ocean of darkness’ being overtaken by an ‘ocean of light’. The poet experienced his enlightenment, becoming convinced that all men were brothers, standing in the gap between the two fields of the poem’s title. So they become, as well as being a literal reference to location of an event, symbolic of the two worlds and the point at which they meet (the poet held that the spiritual world could only be discussed via symbols). The photograph of the place reproduced here shows a field on each facing page with the hedgerow between them springing from the book’s spine. The ‘gap’ is marked by a post, but otherwise disappears from view at the bottom of the picture, the eye being drawn away to some horses in one of the fields. So the ordinariness of the place is conveyed together with the elusive sense of somewhere between these spaces. Most of the photographs appear on single pages with a large amount of white space around them. Many, too, (unlike this one) are produced in such a way that they refuse the photographic illusion of naturalness and their framing in white space emphasises their construction as created objects. What is refused here is not literal representation so much as the innocence of the human viewer. We are encouraged to look with a critical eye rather than as consumers of pleasing views, just as the quotations from Waldo’s poems and other writings are defamiliarised by their presentation alongside often challenging images.

There is in obvious danger that extracting lines from poems simply provides sound-bite versions of Waldo’s works alongside the photographs. But this is resisted by both photographer and editor. A picture of a dead bird, its bones exposed, faces lines from the poem – ‘O Bridd’:

A phwy yw hon sy’n lladd
Eu hadar yn nwfn y gwrych,
Yn taflu i’r baw’r plu blwydd,
I’w gwatwar ag amdo gwych?
(And who is this that kills/Their birds in the depth of the hedge/throwing a year’s worth of feathers to the mud/to be mocked in a gaudy shroud?)

This from a poem which might be thought to represent a darker side to the poet’s vision. At the end of it God waits in a frozen place untainted by Earth’s soil; at the end of ‘Geneth Ifanc’ the image of death is transformed into an affirmation of continuing life and these lines also appear here opposite the photograph of the dead bird. Putting both quotations and the photograph together underlines the complexity of the poet’s vision and avoids the tendency to sentimentalise his positive view of humanity.

The photographs offered are, like Waldo’s poetry, by turns atmospheric (reflecting the photographer’s desire to present the ‘mystic detail’ of the earth in Wales), arresting, challenging and puzzling. Sometimes literal, more often symbolic, they offer an interpretation of the words they accompany rather than simply seeking to illustrate them. They are grouped into episodes or themes so that, for instance, we get a series of landscapes of which the Two Fields already discussed is one and is followed by another landscape from the same area in which dramatic cloud formations bear an uncanny resemblance to the mushroom cloud following a nuclear explosion. Sometimes the sequences are shocking in a more personal sense. The dead bird sequence has a sculptured bird with a broken wing opposite the reference to the poet’s dead wife Linda as “a small bird above the world’s thorns”. Both editor and photographer can be congratulated on the production of a thought-provoking artefact that is by no means merely the attractive coffee table volume it might at first appear to be.
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GregsBookCell | Dec 5, 2008 |

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