Last Poem for Sarah — And Other Poems

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Cyfrol o gerddi gan John Powell Ward sy'n 85 oed ac yn seithfed degawd ei yrfa, yn cynnig gwaith cofiadwy am atgofion am fywyd yn yr ugeinfed ganrif yng Nghymru. Un o'r darnau mwyaf dirdynnol yw ei farwnad i'w ddiweddar wraig, Sarah.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

In Last Poems for Sarah & Other Poems , John Powell Ward, now at the age of eighty-five and in the seventh decade of his career, offers memorable work on recollections of a twentieth century life in Wales. Most poignant is his commentary on grief in the titular elegy for his late wife, Sarah.

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Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography

John Powell Ward, a poet with strong connections to Wales, was born in Suffolk and educated at the Universities of Toronto, Cambridge and Wales. Editor of Poetry Wales from 1975 to 1980, he is the author of critical works on Wordsworth and R.S. Thomas among others, and editor of the Border Lines series. His career displays seven decades of writing and publishing poetry and criticism

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

John Powell Ward is an eminent poet, critic, academic, broadcaster and past editor of Poetry Wales . Born in Suffolk but with Welsh ancestors, he worked at Swansea University for many years. His works include studies of Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy, whose influences can be felt in these poems. His pleasure and skill in form, ‘to / rhyme with time or scan with chime’, is shown in the opening sequence of fourteen sonnets, where, in his fourteen lines, he constantly shifts rhyme patterns and plays with assonance, and with both full and half-rhyme, to look back over his life. ‘[A]ll is mobility’ – from the remembered lost Eden of grandpa’s garden, through school and a growing awareness of the world around him, to a search for its meaning. There is a glimpse of Canada and gangland London, then the move to Wales and stability until, at sixty, he contemplates ‘the last lap’. The sequence is framed by two poems about the making of poetry itself. In the first, the poem is seen as a child, cherished, then sent out into the world to find its own future. In the second (‘No more poetry’), apparently turning to the business of everyday living, he calls back the muse because poems will live beyond individual life; though in this brief form the sequence has echoes of Wordsworth’s recollection of childhood’s perspective and his search for man’s meaning in an apparently indifferent universe. There is also the minute natural detail in the sixth sonnet on birds and in ‘Bits from North Gower’ in the next group: ‘Ten Poems for Wales’. This contains very contrasting poems. In ‘Since the Sixties (1984),’ the complexities of life at that time are mirrored in his complex sound patterns. The multifarious train passengers with unknown lives are flung together on a speeding train towards ‘[a] brand new Wales’, but the final image is of a sword to the heart. (The regular rhythm stutters at ‘going over points’, a nice Auden touch, and Auden is recalled again in the ironic final lines of the next poem.) Clearly fond of life in Wales, with his family in Kent he is ‘[a] home-brewed Englishman…’ Just before their fiftieth wedding anniversary, Sarah Ward died. The collection Instead of Goodbye (2017) was the poet’s first response to her death. Five years later he has written ‘Last Poem for Sarah’ (which gives its title to this collection). This poem is full of contradictions: a struggle through confusion but with one constant – his continuing love for Sarah. The facing of ‘being alone, still married, separate’, the waiting but not being sure if there is a future in which they will be together, is a constant struggle. He takes refuge in memories of her material actions as a farmer, so practical and determined that nothing should be wasted. He recognises the five years have changed him: ‘I learn the art of being alone / and hone the emptiness of years’ – ‘Loss too is lost’ – but he still speaks of ‘us’, even if ‘us’ is no longer a physical entity. It is an immensely touching effort to express the pain and conflicting emotion and to set it into a work of art which is both tribute and agent of acceptance. The first sonnet saw all as mobility, and the collection is full of the shifts and changes of a long life. ‘In a Clock Shop in Holyhead’ gives a different twist to this – ‘time and change / had new beginnings’. Many of the poems are about transitions in space and time but with new beginnings – even the last.