Extract from work on the poetry of Rhian Edwards: Language Matters

by Dr Matthew Jarvis

(The analysis extracted here follows on from a consideration of Rhian Edwards’s use of accentual verse.)

Two-beat accentual rhythms are possibly the most immediately apparent of Rhian Edwards’s strategies on the level of linguistic music. However, in his important and detailed review of Clueless Dogs on Todd Swift’s Eyewear blog,[1] Ben Stainton has suggested a capacity in Edwards’s poetry for what he calls ‘witty half-rhymes’, identifying the brief poem ‘Eyeful’ as an example of this:

Presumably, Stainton sees this as a half-rhyme abab structure (dizzy/nudity; drunk/enough). However, in terms of its linguistic music, there is manifestly more going on here than just half-rhymes. The first two lines, for example, are structured strictly in parallel in terms of each word’s initial consonant, creating a sort of delayed (and visually vertical) type of alliteration. Of course, alliteration is also the driving musical force of lines three and four, with nudity, not, nearly, naked, and enough tying the lines tightly into a sort of sonic unison. But across these two lines, we should also note the assonance of face and naked. Indeed, to turn back once more to the first two lines, there is a strongly figured architecture across the vowels of the stressed syllables moving from low to high then high to low: Looking [low vowel] – dizzy [high vowel]/licking [repeated high vowel] – drunk [variant low vowel]. And this, I would suggest, creates precisely the rise and fall of a musical phrase – an important notion for a poet who has said that ‘As a musician, the rhythms and the musicality of the language in poetry are key for me.’[3]
In a similar way, ‘Sea of Her’[4] – the poem that follows ‘Eyeful’ in Clueless Dogs – adopts half-rhymes of belly/gently, flesh/breath, dreamed/drowned. But it also makes clear play with a strong sequence of both alliteration and long vowels, in the lines ‘There, I dozed and I dreamed, / I lazed and I lounged’ (the long vowels here rendered in bold), with dozed and lazed also linked together through an internal consonance. Indeed, in the final two lines (‘In her pool of milk skin / this man practically drowned’), there is both the repetition of an initial ‘p’ sound across the lines (pool/practically) and the repeated internal ‘k’ of ‘milk skin’. Moreover, just taking the first stanza of ‘Tiptoe’, the same sort of sonic multiplicity is again on display:

Once more patterned predominantly on a two-beat accentual line,[6] this stanza begins with alliteration on the stressed syllables: dreamless/dialogues in line one and ephemera/affection in line two. There is then a break from alliteration in line three, but it returns in line four with contentious/claims. Lines one and three contain a double echo in the repetition of the ‘-less’ suffix in dreamless and shoeless and in the intial ‘dia-’ of dialogues and dialects. Similarly, lines three and four are tied together by the triple repetition of the ‘sh’ sound in shoeless, contentious, and passions.
However, Edwards’s rich linguistic patterning by means of such strategies of repetition is not restricted to just a phonetic level. She also uses parallelism on the level of the phrase in order to create structure. Thus, in ‘The Welshman Who Couldn’t Sing’,[7] the poem’s stanzas all begin with a first-person present continuous statement, in which the poem’s speaker is doing something either to or in relation to the poem’s eponymous subject:

The same technique – in other words, marking stanza beginnings by means of syntactic parallelism –is also used in ‘Quotidian’,[8] with each of the four verses of the poem beginning with the phrase ‘It’s all about’ – variously continuing with ‘the habits’, ‘those minutes’, ‘disarray’, and ‘the hush’. Indeed, a related strategy is used as the poem ‘Girl Meats Boy’ draws towards its bravura rhythmic conclusion, with one twelve-line stanza bound together by concluding each line with the words ‘of you’ (seven instances), ‘on you’ (once), ‘in you’ (once) or just ‘you’ (three instances, each preceded by a present participle):

In other words, across rhythm, various phonetic ploys, and phrasal repetition, Rhian Edwards’s poetry displays an array of distinctive linguistic features that collectively constitute an emphatic deployment of linguistic musicality.
Before I move onto the second part of my overall analysis in this chapter, there is one more linguistic issue that I want to address. This is to do with what Hugo Williams describes as the ‘distinctly un-English sound’ and ‘Celtic bass-line’ of Edwards’s poetry.[10] This notion is something that Edwards herself argues for when she suggests, in interview, that:

Leaving aside the question of an identifiably Welsh (specifically, Bridgend) accent within her poetry performances, it seems to me that Edwards’s words on the page are overwhelmingly written in language patterns that are broadly free from localising qualities: in short, and as the quotations I have cited so far I would suggest make clear, my sense is that this is poetry that is predominantly constructed in Standard English. Nonetheless, in the poem ‘Going Back for Light’ in particular, there are instances where Wenglish very definitely makes its presence felt[12] – ‘Wenglish’ being The Dialect of the South Wales Valleys, as the sub-title of Robert Lewis’s important study of this language-form describes it.[13] On the level of subject-matter, ‘Going Back for Light’ – which Edwards explains ‘is about a great-grandfather’ whom she ‘never met’[14] – suggests its rootedness in South Wales history in the opening reference to the experience of the poem’s subject as a miner who ‘Got blacklisted at the colliery for making ructions’ and in the reference in stanza three to the sourcing of a dance floor from Caerphilly Hall. However, such familiar cultural-historical and geographical references to one side, it is in the language that the poem’s South Walian rootedness is most strikingly apparent. Robert Lewis’s study of Wenglish makes clear that the Bridgend of Edwards’s childhood falls in the ‘Western Area of Wenglish’,[15] and distinctive Wenglish language-forms are apparent throughout the poem. Thus, the final line of stanza one observes that ‘His coughs had been turning red for a while mind’ – that final ‘mind’ being listed in Lewis’s extensive glossary as a feature in Wenglish which ‘adds little to the meaning but acts as an intensifier or to ensure the listener’s full attention’.[16] Indeed, stanza six sees a recurrence of this linguistic feature (‘Daft over him, women were. His dark looks that was, / mind’).[17] Moreover, the use of ‘compo’ for compensation in stanza two is also cited by Lewis as part of Wenglish vocabulary.[18] But it is in the syntactic form of ‘Loved that dance hall, he did’ (stanza two), ‘Always smoking he was’ (stanza three), ‘Getting ready for no good, we reckoned’ (stanza four), ‘Pair of chocolates, those eyes’ (stanza five), and ‘Daft over him, women were’ (stanza six) that the poem perhaps most clearly identifies its linguistic allegiances. Robert Lewis argues that:

It is this quality of Wenglish emphatics that ‘Going Back for Light’ captures in the word order of the phrases that I have just cited – and which mark this poem out as distinctively Welsh (and particularly South Walian) precisely in its linguistic forms.