It’s​ a sorry situation when the most repeated fact about someone’s life is that a famous person was best man at their wedding. Dylan Thomas did the honours for Lynette Roberts and her groom in 1939, wearing a ‘smart brown suit’ he borrowed for the occasion. ‘I carried wild flowers and gave Dylan a bunchful of wild flowers for his lapel,’ Roberts recalled. ‘Vernon Watkins’s trousers were draped around his shoes.’ Thomas had promised to return the suit ‘unegged, straight after the wedding’, though in the event he kept it. ‘She’s a curious girl,’ he said of Roberts, when he wrote to Watkins asking for the loan of the suit, ‘a poet, as they say, in her own right, with … all the symptoms of hysteria’ – a bit rich coming from Thomas.

Roberts published two collections with Faber under T.S. Eliot’s editorship: Poems in 1944 and Gods with Stainless Ears in 1951, though the latter was written first. She recalled visiting Eliot at the Faber offices in 1948 with her two small children, Angharad and Prydein, who ‘were both impossible. They spat on the floor and tore up the jasmine and pamphlets of paper, they cried and fought. Mr Eliot’s approach to them was maternal and apart from one or two considerations which prove this we spoke above their heads and through this frightful din.’

A Letter to the Dead, edited by Patrick McGuinness and Charles Mundye, is a new edition of Roberts’s Collected Poems; the first was published in 2005, ten years after her death, at which point her work had been out of print for decades. (There was an earlier attempt to put out a Collected in 1998, edited by John Pikoulis and published by Seren, but it seems the introduction was not approved by Roberts’s family and the book was pulped.) This new edition, with 65 freshly unearthed poems, is three centimetres thick (exactly the same as the copy I have of Thomas’s). It seems a fair size for someone who stopped writing in their forties.

Roberts has been embraced as a Welsh or Anglo-Welsh poet, but her heritage is more complex. Though Wales was her richest source of inspiration, her perspective in the poems is generally that of an outsider. Her poem ‘Lamentation’ begins: ‘To the village of lace and stone/Came strangers. I was one of these/Always observant and slightly obscure.’ The last phrase provides a neat, if limited, summary of Roberts’s work. Born in Buenos Aires in 1909 to Australian parents of Welsh descent, she spent part of her childhood in Argentina and part in the UK, where she attended a boarding school in Bournemouth following her mother’s death when she was about to turn fourteen. Roberts moved to London in the 1930s, where she met her future husband, the Welsh poet and editor Keidrych Rhys, at a Poetry London event. (Rhys had been christened William Ronald Rees Jones, but renamed himself after a river near his home.) After their wedding the couple moved to the village of Llanybri; they would divorce a decade later. For a period Roberts found herself living in a caravan with two toddlers in a graveyard in Laugharne, the town that Thomas had fictionalised as Llareggub (‘bugger all’ backwards) in Under Milk Wood. After that she moved back to England, where she lived for the next twenty years, before returning to Wales. ‘You have a Welsh name, are you Welsh?’ Rhys had asked her when they first met. ‘I don’t know,’ she replied.

A stranger in Llanybri, Roberts immersed herself in the village’s way of life. Her imagination was captured by its people, creatures (birds in particular), landscapes and rhythms. Diaries, Letters and Recollections (2008), also edited by McGuinness, includes her diary of the war years, a fascinating historical document in which she relates learning to weave straw rope, stack sheaves and make pele, or cwlwm (anthracite dust mixed with clay that was used as fuel). These anthropological descriptions are interspersed with thoughts on subjects as varied as bulls, coracles (on which she published an essay) and the importance of ventilation in the prevention of tuberculosis; lists of flowers (‘Spurge, Self Heal, Ramping Fumitory … Common Agrimony, Hairy Willowherb, Lady’s Bedstraw’); and character sketches of villagers. Particularly delightful is a farmer called Jack Vaughan, who was said to enjoy dousing himself with perfume: ‘Oh, he’s a terror for scent, Mrs Rhys. Always going at Muriel’s bottles and shaking it over himself before he takes out the cows. Lavender is what he likes best or Carnation.’

Roberts brings this variety of modes to her poetry too, merging an ethnographer’s impressions with something more playful, as in her best-known work, ‘Poem from Llanybri’. Originally written for her fellow poet Alun Lewis, with whom she had a romantically charged correspondence, it extends to its addressee an invitation to ‘come my way’, promising an itinerary of local specialities during his visit:

                                                At noon-day
I will offer you a choice bowl of cawl
Served with a ‘lover’s’ spoon and a chopped spray
Of leeks or savori fach, not used now,

In the old way you’ll understand.

This combination of the simple and eccentric is typical of Roberts’s poems, in which an idiosyncrasy of expression complicates what might otherwise seem straightforward. Her attention to the particularity of sensory experience (‘a fist full of rock cress’, ‘the valley tips of garlic red with dew’), along with her ear for local speech patterns, gives the speaker strange authority; the invitation has the quality of an enchantment, like a summons from a witch.

Roberts knew there was no such thing as a free gift. In her diary she commented on the neighbourliness of villagers (who would bring ‘trays of food … or bowls of “cawl”’ for anyone ill), remarking that ‘the neighbour is usually the most helping friend: but if I am truthful, as I must be, it is also partly because the neighbour sees that she, too, might have a “turn” and require help.’ Given that ‘Poem from Llanybri’ was conceived as part of a correspondence, it’s not hard to see that its offering is also a request for reciprocation, and that beneath the charm of its address there’s an unspoken imperative: loneliness.

Rhys was often away (he had been called up in 1940 and after going AWOL from the army was moved to the Ministry of Information), so Roberts spent a lot of time alone. ‘Then I’ll do the lights, fill the lamp with oil,/Get coal from the shed, water from the well,’ she writes in ‘Poem from Llanybri’, imagining herself accompanied in what must at times have been a hard daily routine:

A sit by the hearth with blue flames rising,
No talk. Just a stare at ‘Time’ gathering
Healed thoughts, pool insight

[…]

You must come – start this pilgrimage
Can you come?

‘I feel wretchedly lonely,’ Roberts wrote in her diary in August 1942. She believed there was ‘malicious talk’ in Llanybri suggesting that she was a spy; the village children had started throwing stones at her and ‘a young boy kicked my dog in the stomach … just to get at me.’ Her poem ‘Raw Salt on Eye’ draws on this experience. Llanybri, no longer welcoming, has become a ‘stone village’, the villagers a ‘hard people’ and the cosy hearth depicted above is now a ‘cold grate’. Roberts was certainly very interested in the villagers and their habits, but her ‘spycraft’ had more benign ends. Many of her poems are infused with a vicarious nationalism (though, as McGuinness notes, this is accompanied by ‘her cosmopolitan’s idealisation of the simple life’): ‘Here a perfect people set – on red rock,/White and grey as gull met/Pure to plough,’ she writes in ‘Broken Voices’ (an attempt at an englyn, a strict Welsh poetic form). Meanwhile ‘Fifth of the Strata’ predicts:

And before tomorrow
England will be
For thousands of years
Lying below us
A submerged village.

‘We must uprise O my people,’ she exhorts the reader in Gods with Stainless Ears, a rallying cry to the Welsh to shake off melancholy and break into song or dance:

                                                        Though
Secretly trenched in sorrel, we must
Upshine, outshine the day’s sun

[…]

And with cuprite crest and petulant feet
Distil our notes into febrile weeds

Subtitled ‘A Heroic Poem’, this book-length, five-part work is an impressive, if at times bewildering, synthesis of modernism, sci-fi and war poetry. It follows a gunner and his girl through a series of ensemble scenes, somehow seen from above – in fact, Roberts pictured the poem being filmed. At one point the protagonists drift through ‘the strata of the sky’. ‘Strata’ is an important word for Roberts, indicative of the geological and cosmic scope of her work. In Gods with Stainless Ears such reaches – ‘I contented in this fourth dimensional state’ – provide solace from the realities of war and its aftermath: ‘a hard and new chemical dawn’.

Eliot found the manuscript of Gods with Stainless Ears ‘stiff going’, and his decision to publish a volume of Roberts’s short poems first makes sense. Reading the book is like taking an arduous trek through dense foliage, which occasionally opens out into spectacular views. I would be slumped in my chair, puzzling over esoteric allusions, when a sparkling fragment of language made me sit up. There’s the Wallace Stevens-esque: ‘Leaf feathers of the white-eyed woodpecker/Spangled with lime leaves, wearing the/Chuckling red hat!’ Or how about: ‘A shark wind teethes,/Strips fields; striating black fullstops under hedge.’ Or: ‘Let the whaleback of the sea/Fall back into a wrist of ripples, slit,/Snip up the moon sniggering on its back.’ And what to make of this absurdly overblown description of a herb garden?

Corymb of coriander: each ray frosted
Incandescent: by square stem held, hispid,
And purple spotted. Twice pinnate with fronds
Of chrome. Laid higher than the exulted hedge;
By pure collated disc of daisy glittering

White on a red powdered stem. By cusp of leaves
Held low to ground; this coriander cane,
Colonnade of angelica, chervil, fennel,
Parsley, aniseed, caraway, yarrow,
All kitchen’s frescade culled and tied away.

By this eyelet and low fieldfare herbs are
Accentuated; engraved and brought to light.

I doubt anyone has referred to a hedge as ‘exulted’ before. (Marvell, possibly.) Yet somehow the poem’s linguistic excess becomes more and more appealing. One begins to enjoy the grandiosity, the extravagant chewiness of Roberts’s language. It starts to seem right that ‘the flowers of the field’ should be elevated in this way, ornately framed and displayed: ‘engraved and brought to light’.

Roberts loved obscure words and was not shy about using them. Over the course of two pages, I had to look up ‘corymb’, ‘cymes’, ‘chyles’, ‘cuprite’, ‘gault’, ‘zebeline’, ‘tamarisk’, ‘neumes’ and ‘whimbrel’. Where else, you might ask, can a person make such liberal use of exotic words, if not in a modernist poem from the 1940s? But even Eliot had his doubts about these lexical pyrotechnics. In an editorial query about ‘Poem’ (an excerpt from Gods which also appeared in Roberts’s first book), he remarked that ‘the words plimsole, cuprite, zebeline and neumes seem to exist but I think that bringing them all into one short poem is a mistake.’ Roberts held firm. In a preface to the long poem, she wrote that ‘the use of congested words, images and certain hard metallic lines are introduced with deliberate emphasis to represent a period of muddled and intense thought which arose out of the first years of conflict.’ This is fair enough, but one gets the impression that Roberts’s approach was sometimes that of a too-prescriptive parent: her ambitions for a poem were often in danger of overwhelming it.

In​ a radio talk reproduced in McGuinness and Mundye’s appendix, Roberts recalls that an editor once asked her to change the phrase ‘corrugated roof over their cultured hut’ because ‘it was so ugly. He did not see that that was the purpose of the whole poem.’ She is referring here to ‘The New World’, one of several poems in her first book that draw on her memories of South America. ‘Royal Mail’, another of these, is a homesick poem comparing the vivid colours of her childhood with ‘this damp and stony stare of a village’: ‘I would see again São Paulo:/The coffee coloured house with its tarmac roof/And spray of tangerine berries.’

Roberts did ‘amazing things with colour’, the painter Sheila Healey once said. She had been to art school – several of her paintings are included in A Letter to the Dead – and trained to be a florist in the 1930s with Constance Spry. One may not think of Wales, with its ‘rain and interminable mist’, as having a particularly vibrant palette, but Roberts’s radiant images show otherwise. Light infuses her work, sometimes to an otherworldly degree. She wrote an essay on Welsh architecture in which she described the country’s ‘magnesium light’: ‘a light which glazes every building, stone and tree, and I hope I may be forgiven if I say a few words about it’. She also said plenty about it in her poems. ‘Who polished this day? String of mackerel and glue/Sized and scoured sky to its finest grain of blue,’ she writes in ‘Thursday September the Tenth’, a poem that picks out a day’s gleaming edges through a series of painterly impressions: ‘Meat cover on slab of slate prosecuting inkstand/Cold basin and porcelain plate. Day’s bristol shine: a band/Of empty beer bottles, wine jars green for thirst.’ McGuinness, in his introduction, compares Roberts’s ‘poetic aerial views’ with the paintings of Eric Ravilious, and that sense of panoramic scale is evident in much of her work. But if Ravilious’s colours are muted, or bleached by light, Roberts’s light seems to intensify colour. Her earliest visions in South America – ‘the brilliance of its sky’ and ‘the hot mood/Blazing from the drooping noon’ – seem to have been rekindled by the ‘blue-life-mist rising from the flaming earth’ of the Welsh landscape.

Although Roberts’s work shows modernist influences, it has also been situated within the ‘naive’ or folk tradition. For all the cerebral vigour of her poems, there’s a kind of artlessness to them. In ‘A Letter to the Dead’, a poem addressed to Thomas, she recalls his advice to ‘think of myself, to go abroad/And over the bounds with my poetry: to care not a fig/Pig or jig for anyone’. She was very much doing her own thing. How many women were writing war poetry in the 1940s? In Gods with Stainless Ears, she writes:

                                                REMEMBER AGAIN
BLOOD IS HUMAN. BORN AT COST. REMEMBER THIS
ESPECIALLY YOU TAWDRY LAIRDS AND JUGGLERS OF MINT

That brief, powerful phrase ‘BORN AT COST’ alludes to her experience of miscarriage in March 1940 but also to the gendered insult of war: male violence destroying the work of women who have laboured to bring human beings into the world. ‘And They Had for Their Grave Plague Bones Ground to Dust’, which opens with a graphic depiction of human destruction, offers this observation:

From the futility and comedy of war,
stiffen our sight that we may adjust
ourselves to this terrible truth:
(the universal truth suffered by all at war).
Against the farcical rendering of
‘few casualties … little damage done’?
        My God.

Roberts suffered a breakdown in the mid-1950s, from which she never fully recovered; she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and hospitalised several times. She became a Jehovah’s Witness and stopped writing, taking ‘no further interest in her work or literary reputation’, McGuinness notes. But her abandonment of poetry need not be seen as tragic. As Roberts wrote in her diary in 1939, ‘Keidrych says I have some funny ideas about poets. I have. I think good real living is more important than spreading yourself on paper.’ She died of heart failure at the age of 86, having suffered a heart attack in hospital the previous year. She’d been admitted after falling and breaking her hip while dancing.