Welcome!

Welcome to The Igam-Ogam Mabinogion. By way of explanation, especially to those who might be completely unfamiliar with such a title, the Mabinogion is a renowned collection of mediaeval Welsh tales, while Igam-Ogam is simply Welsh for ‘zig–zag‘. ‘Mabinogi’/’Mabinogion‘  has the meaning of ‘youthful tales’ – and combined with ‘Igam-Ogam’ the intention is to represent what you will discover here as ‘diverse and wandering jottings, young at heart’. They are diverse in the subject matter they cover, and in their varying styles; they are young at heart, I like to think, even though their composer is not exactly a spring chicken.

What will you expect to see on The Igam-Ogam Mabinogion?  Well, basically poetry of all kinds —rhymed, unrhymed, metrical and unmetrical, lengthy and brief, descriptive and imaginary, serious and humorous. There is little which employs traditional verse forms—you will find no Petrarchan sonnets, ottava rima, etc.—with many of these I am simply a ‘No-good Boyo’; neither, in the other extreme, will you find that which is deliberately and fashionably obscure. What characterizes much of the poetry shown here is rhythm; for it may be safely said that without rhythm and its attributes there can be no poetry. Subjects are both Welsh and universal, dealing with personal memories and reflections, journeys real and imaginary, the affairs of gods and goddesses, men, women, and love, the fascinations of the natural world and of the Otherworld, and, of course, the Welsh past and present. There are the shorter epigrams and Haiku, and a selection of translations—a handful from the French, and a good many from the Classical Chinese. I embrace archaic language where it is fitting, as well as the occasional slickness found in the modern. There is the playful, and the downright daft.

A little about myself: A good many years ago (perhaps I should say ‘Once upon a time’) my poetry appeared alongside that of R.S. Thomas, Vernon Watkins, Dannie Abse, and other Welsh poets writing in English at that time—Roland Mathias, Harri Webb, John Tripp, Meic Stephens, and others. Outside the Welsh circle I shared pages with poets Thomas Kinsella, Donald Davie… and now I’m mentioning too many names, but will go ahead and say that I was honoured to share publication space with Eugene Ionesco and Vladimir Nabokov. These were heady, happy days which I remember with a sense of satisfaction. But duty called me away from this – there was a young family to care for, and a career to be pursued, and the writing years were all too brief and a long time ago. In the intervening decades, though, I seldom ceased scribbling, and now, with around a thousand poems including the translations, and much else tucked away, I thought it opportune to enter the stage again.

Please see the full poems below in the order they were posted up, or select by name from the menu at the top right. If you like what you see and wish to be informed of new poems as they are posted, simply leave a comment beneath any of the poems. Thank you!