I have recently been reading a posthumous collection of Welsh-language verse by Tony Bianchi: Rhwng Pladur a Blaguryn. I was friendly with Tony when I was a post-graduate student and he had a fellowship in the same university and I have had intermittent contact with him, both professionally and informally, in the 35 years or so since then. So it was a shock to hear of his death last year. Tony was a Geordie from North Shields who, like myself, came to university in Wales and never left. He learnt Welsh sufficiently well to be able to write and publish both poetry and prose in the language. The posthumous collection that I have been reading includes poems written in Welsh cynghanedd metres. Some are very compact and highly charged englyns which manage both to be good examples of the formal requirements of this verse form and also very personal expressions of his characteristics and his concerns. The one that gives the volume its name goes like this:
Rhwng plader a blaguryn; rhwng afal
a’r anghofio sydyn;
rhwng y gwaed a’r angau’r gwyn;
o wynfa i bla: trwch blewyn.
Which I venture to translate, without the supporting force of the cynghanedd, like this:
Between scythe and budding shoot;
between an apple and the sudden forgetting;
between the blood and the pale death;
from paradise to plague : a hair’s breadth.
So it was for him: a vibrant life suddenly ended after a brief illness. That ‘hair’s breadth’ between life and death crossed in what seemed like an instant, the poem capturing in the brevity of its concise form the moment of transition. Finding those perceptions embedded in the tight formal structure of an englyn, opening out from the cynghanedd links which hold together the sequence of images leading to the final half line: ‘trwch blewyn’ with its shiver of liminality, is a miraculous revelation.
So the Awen fell on a scion of the Old North living in modern Wales, allowing the expression of an insight that was so characteristically his own, carrying his living breath, contained in an apparently restricting verse form which one of its exponents has described, paraphrasing Dylan Thomas, as ‘singing in chains’*, but which here seems to wear those chains lightly, releasing rather than imprisoning his words.
The book also contains longer poems, including an account of his daughter’s wedding which is both tender and amusing in a way that expresses Tony’s own character so eloquently. It will remain for me a living record of his voice, contained by death but released by his words and so free in the world he has left behind him.
*Singing in Chains by Mererid Hopwood (Gomer, 2004)
Rhwng Pladur a Blaguryn Tony Bianchi (Barddas, 2018)
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