Locating Lynette Roberts

Introduction

Lynette Roberts is an extraordinary modernist poet and novelist, with her vivid imagery and restless experimentalism. Her writing displays a kind of double longing – for Wales, and for the Argentina she left behind. Her poetry constantly moves between the colours, mythologies and landscapes of the two countries and, in so doing, poses a series of important questions: where, and what, is home? How do we inhabit a particular time and place? This volume of essays brings together for the first time some of the most important research on Roberts’s work that has emerged since the landmark republication of her Collected Poems in 2005. Written by a range of prominent scholars, writers and poets, each essay strives in some way to ‘place’ Roberts, analysing the environments to which her writing responds and teasing out the interwoven skeins of her national, cultural and political affiliations. Together, they pinpoint key concerns in Roberts’s elusive, haunting work, and define her original contribution to twentieth-century literary culture.