Amnest Gwilym (2026) Contemplation of Roses

I’m smart enough to know I don’t know anything much worth knowing about poetry in particular. In ‘Introduction to Poetry’ in Amnest Gwilym’s latest collection, she offers some sage advice that had me thinking back to all those creative writing tutors inviting you—ever so nicely—to interrogate your work:

‘But all you want to do

is place my poem in a birdcage,

force it to sing its song,

You start by starving it

to find out what it means.’

I’m going to witter on about my unknowingness but not wear it as a badge of my ignorance. Or say the  stupidest things like  of her previous poetry collections,  Surfacing (2018) and What the Owl Taught Me (2020) about the natural landscape and seeing and hearing, being present to the world’s bouquets, her latest collection has grown more chatty. More personal.

In the first section, as in previous collections,  ‘Spring’ springs—‘in trees shouting begin, begin, begin’ and Early Autumn falls with ‘Soon the dears will come and shyly, stamp out

‘the last blazing embers of summer’.   

Gwilym and me, the Welsh and the Scot are in broad agreement with John Betjeman, from his 1937 poem Slough: ‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!’ but she’s widened the appeal and included ‘Dear London’, generally, in a twisted love letter of the things she hasn’t forgotten or forgiven.

Loneliness that modern plague turns up and she’s dedicated a few poems to Helen Dunmore. I admire her books too.

‘Twilight’ takes us back to the beginning and end of our musing of this short and other collections, slow down, pay attention ‘almost like love, or a blessing’. Read on.  

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0HG7ZY1Z4