Second Whisper, A

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Mae Lynne Hjelmgaard yn dwyn i gof ei bywyd a'r hyn a garodd yn ei chyfrol o gerddi. Ceir yma gerddi i'w diweddar ŵr a fu farw yn 2006, ac i Dannie Abse, a oedd yn fentor iddi ac a fu farw yn 2014. Aiff darnau eraill â ni i Efrog Newydd, Denmarc, y Caribî a Llundain. Mae goslef ei chanu yn fanwl a chynnes, ac wedi'i daenu â gobaith am yfory.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

Lynne Hjelmgaard movingly recollects her life and loves: there are poems to her late husband as well as to her mentor and partner, the renowned Welsh poet Dannie Abse, who died in 2014. Other pieces transport us to New York, Denmark, The Caribbean, and London. Her lyrics are precise, warm in tone, and suffused with optimism for the future.

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Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography

Lynne Hjelmgaard has three published poetry collections: Manhattan Sonnets (Redbeck Press 2003), The Ring (Shearsman 2011) and A Boat Called Annalise (Seren 2016.) Versions of poems from A Second Whisper have appeared in magazines and anthologies, most recently in the summer issue of Poetry Wales , 2018. She is presently working on a sequence of responses to the poems of Dannie Abse.

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

This is Lynne Hjelmgaard’s fourth collection of poems and its contents recall many different periods of her much-travelled life, from her youth in New York, to her married life in Denmark and elsewhere, a home in Cardiff (shared with poet Dannie Abse) and a flat in London. It is a record of and a response to many different kinds of love and the loss of loved ones but with a restless, seeking spirit in the poetry which prevents it from being pulled down by grief. In the poem, ‘You, Lizard-like’, she sees herself as ‘expert at loss, loyal to none’… ‘How quickly / you can flee and shed your skin.’ But the poems are not of someone casually unfaithful but of a survivor of loss who remembers and treasures past love but is not imprisoned by the memory. After a long, happy marriage, Hjelmgaard was widowed in 2006 and later met and bonded with the older, widowed Dannie Abse. At first they shared that grief, ‘And for a time it was the four of us. Though, one day, without ceremony, we noted their absence.’ Her poems of their time together and her subsequent loss of him are vivid and poignant, particularly ‘The Gift’ and the simplicity of ‘With Dannie’. The love she seems least sure about is maternal love. The one poem on her mother suggests a difficult relationship later understood and, in a poem to Berith, her daughter, there is some sense of early confusion despite deep closeness in later life. ‘The Exchange’, dedicated to her son, suggests something more problematic: ‘distances and silences / lengthy measured pauses / or wrong notes.’ ‘My Children Walk Ahead’ is a simple scene, simply described, which gathers weight with every line. Love of friends is also celebrated and its loss through time regretted in ‘Once’, a tribute to a Danish friend but ‘Now we write careful letters / as if they are to lost versions / of ourselves.’ There are a few poems about life alone in London and the neighbours above and below – ‘No-see-ums’, known only through their sounds – and also one charming ‘Hampstead Poem’ on her neighbour opposite, with whom she plays a half-conscious game of hide-and-seek. Lynne Hjelmgaard’s poems are generally very approachable and even deceptively simple but their power creeps up on the reader. AS Gillian Clarke writes, you can read them through ‘at one stretch’ but they also stay with you, speaking to many different kinds of experience.