Welsh Journals

Cynthia & Saunders Davies (eds.), Euros Bowen, priest- poetlbardd-offeiriad (Penarth, Church in Wales Publications, 1993) pp. 154. pbk. ISBN 0 85326 073 7. £ 5.95p. Cynthia and Saunders Davies are to be congratulated on this volume, both in the thought and the execution. It was certainly proper that the Church in Wales should celebrate the life and work of its finest Welsh-language poet of recent times, and it was entirely suitable that such a celebration should take the form of a parallel-text selection from his verse. On the one hand, he belonged to the Welsh-speaking community and believed passionately in its raison d'etre, a belief he often expressed in public with a not untypical ferocity. On the other hand, there is an unarguable universality about his verse which transcends national and linguistic divisions, an universality which stems both from a catholicity of faith and a rich vein of Classical scholarship. It is good that a substantial selection of his prolific and it must be said sometimes uneven output should be made available to a wider readership. Cynthia Davies' translations, although wisely making no attempt to represent the constant musical patterns, complex and interwoven, of the original verse, provide a faithful prose version which also retains a good deal of the rhythmic spareness of the original. Donald Allchin's introduction puts a good deal of flesh on the bones of the translations, and presents a sympathetic and knowledgeable portrait of a remarkable poet, stressing his contemporaneity as well as his universality, and all in all his priestly, sacrificial role as a poet. 'It was his task to see the form and the beauty in places apparently without form and comeliness'. It was Yeats' 'innocence and beauty' born of 'custom and ceremony' that Euros was after, in Nature certainly, but also in the works of man. As Saunders Davies says in his preface, 'some critics have suggested that his own poetry was influenced by these [French] Symbolists. Euros Bowen, on the other hand, considered himself a Sacra- mentalist rather' than a Symbolist, and in his poems he functioned as a priest rather than as a preacher'. This is absolutely correct, and I was reminded of it in no uncertain terms some years ago when