The Art of Losing

Twelve Poems on Grief and Consolation

Author(s) M. Wynn Thomas

Language: English

Genre(s): Calon, Literary Criticism, Welsh Interest

  • January 2025 · 112 pages ·198x129mm

  • · Hardback - 9781837600236
  • · eBook - pdf - 9781837600250
  • · eBook - epub - 9781837600267

About The Book

Grief faces all of us in the end. This collection explores how poets have expressed and attempted to come to some kind of understanding of this universal but often under-discussed emotion.   

M. Wynn Thomas explores how each poet gives full, unbridled expression of their pain, before moving towards a resolution that places the experience of grief in a consolingly meaningful context.  

Covering subjects from the loss of a loved one to the death of a language, from the medieval period to the present day, this powerful collection sheds light on the pain of loss and the search for meaning and even hope in it. To those of us walking through grief and loss, these poems offer a guiding hand. 

 

Contents

Prefatory Note
No Toying With Death
Lewys Glyn Cothi, Un mab oedd degan imi
A Young Moon Entombed
Robert Williams/ Robert ap Gwilym Ddu, Och gur! pwy fesur pa faint
A Black Trench of Loss
R. Williams Parry, Y bardd trwm dan bridd tramor
Bomb Damage
Alun Lewis, Raiders’ Dawn
Funeral Strange
Menna Elfyn, Angladd
Haunted Landscape
Ruth Bidgood, All Souls’
The Atrocity of Aberfan
Leslie Norris, Elegy for David Beynon
A Grim Sir Galahad
Tony Conran, Elegy for the Welsh dead, in the Falkland Islands, 1982
Sweeping Up the Heart
John Ormond [Thomas], After a death
Language Death
Gwyneth Lewis, Roedd y diwedd yn erchyll
The Final Voyage
Rowan Williams, Deathship
No Sunlight Guest
Dannie Abse, The Violin Player

About the Author(s)

Author(s): M. Wynn Thomas

M. Wynn Thomas is Professor of English, and Emyr Humphreys Professor of Welsh Writing in English, at Swansea University.

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