Annest Gwilym (2023) Seasons In The Sun.

I’m familiar with Annest Gwilym’s poetry because she sometimes posts on ABCtales. I have not the patience or understanding to fully appreciate poetry in general or  her thirty-three poems in particular. ‘The Word Collector’ is akin to the green space where Dylan Thomas roamed ‘happy as the grass was green’. Words are her natural home. Seasons in the sun is a way of looking at the world. To capture time and squeeze verse between the bookends of pages.

‘The Desolation of Holiday Homes’ and ‘Wales for Sale’ say the same thing differently.

‘Today, prime location rooms

are flooded with lake lights:

jellied wobbling on walls, unseen…’

Contrast,

‘Homes are cheap here

Ideal of second homes or Skybnb

cash cows, in prime locations…

You’d think you were in England…’

Fuck the upper-middle class English always gets my vote. Wales, of course, is also coal country.

‘Carbon’

The cold slate steps cools my feet, relic

of a dead industry—gouged mountains

and age-old poverty from living on poor land.

To the south, closed coal mines pose as

an  ugly scar, a toothless mouth, an empty hearth

Home, ‘The Sea Captain’s Daughter’.  ‘My soul was a poet’s, a poet my love’. Also a reminder that her grandfather put to sea (went to work) when he was twelve. No romance in that.

I was in a greenhouse today. Late seasonal crop of stolen tomatoes. She’s right.

‘Pick the bottom one of those

hidden behind sticky leaves

the smallest are the sweetest.’

‘Mermaid’ is a wonderful wordsmith fingle with borders on the surreal.

‘I found a mermaid on the beach

wrapped in moon-ruin and fishing nets.

Out of the water her hooked eyes

Were dull, her scales tarnished…

I tried to drag her back into the water…’

I’m pretty sure I read its first incarnation on ABCtales. It would have been poem of the week, poem of the month. All the usual samizdat honours we could fling at her. Not enough. She deserves a bigger audience. Buy this book. Read on.