Welsh Journals

hill farmers, can be read as reflecting the influence of a specifically Welsh literary and spiritual tradition, but there is little mention of such a possibility in the Casebook. And, for all its concentration on Thomas's '70s output, no reference is made here to his 1974 volume, What is a Welshman? or to other poems of the period on Welsh topics-like 'The Small Country' from Frequencies (1978), for example, which in its celebration .of 'the object/ of my contempt that became/ the toad with a jewel in its head!' counterpoints Thomas's harangues against contemporary Welsh culture. The fact that Dyson's volume does not include any post-1981 critical material also limits its value as an assessment of a poet who produced seven volumes of verse and three of prose during the past decade. But, given the wide use of the Casebook series in schools and colleges, this book will at least have the unambiguous merit of underlining for a new generation the importance of Thomas's work. JANE AARON Aberystwyth CYMRU A'R MOR: MARITIME WALES. No. 13 (1990). Gwynedd Archives Service. Pp. 139. £ 6.50. One new feature of this issue of Maritime Wales is the maritime items from nineteenth-century local newspapers, interspersed between the articles. It is also encouraging to learn that notes of the lives, service careers and work of Welsh mariners in the twentieth century are regularly being deposited with the Gwynedd Archives Service, and with the journal, to form a valuable source. Of the three Welsh contributions here, two are particularly interesting. There is a well illustrated account of the evolution of the mediaeval ship and the life of its seamen, drawn from contemporary Welsh literature. The other is an emigrant's account of his cramped 170-day passage from Liverpool to British Columbia in 1862/63, with vivid accounts of the eisteddfodau held on board. Harold Mytum continues his study of west Wales gravestones as a maritime source, while the importance of the Irish sea to Welsh shipping is illustrated by several articles: on the small, schooner-rigged vessels which plied it, one of which, the Mary Ashbumer, was typically engaged in the coal and pig-iron trade until lost in a collision in 1913. This sturdy coaster, under her Amwlch master, sailed regularly from Cardiff to Cork or Belfast, with occasional forays to Duddon or Dieppe. In the same period, the Wanderer, also built at Barrow in the 1870s, for the Lambert family of the Swansea copper ore trade, declined from an elegant yacht to a tramp ship. Two articles deal with sombre events in this century: one, a fatal 'dockhead jump' at Cardiff in 1927 to a trawler subsequently wrecked off the north Cornish coast; the other, a coaster's voyage to Calais in 1940, conveys the confusion of that period before the fall of France. In all, the customary good mix. P. K. CRIMMIN Royal Holloway and Bedford New College