Welsh Argentine poet Lynette Roberts, born in Buenos Aires in 1909, has largely been forgotten, and her work is difficult to categorize because of its range. She could write lyrically and colloquially of Welsh village life as well as of the Argentine pampa and Patagonia. But her most ambitious work was a modernist war epic with a futuristic bent.

Though Spanish was her first language, her poetry was written in English, occasionally interspersed with passages of Welsh. And while her poems have strokes of genius and real beauty, they can sometimes be overwrought. A Letter to the Dead: Collected Poems (Carcanet Classics) is an update of Carcanet’s 2005 edition and includes many previously uncollected and unpublished poems.

T.S. Eliot edited two of Roberts’ collections for Faber. She was on the outskirts of a literary milieu that included Laura Riding and Robert Graves, with whom she corresponded. She studied art in London, became a painter, and was married briefly to Welsh writer Keidrych Rhys. Dylan Thomas, who was best man at their wedding, described her as “a curious girl a poet as they say in her own right…with all the symptoms of hysteria.” Patrick McGuinness, whose introduction is invaluable here, notes that “she emerges as a kind of insider’s outsider, well-connected but somehow out on a limb…”

After her divorce from Rhys, Roberts lived in the village that inspired Thomas’ Under Milk Wood. For a while, her address, written at the bottom of several unpublished poems, was “The Caravan, The Graveyard, Laugharne.” “A Letter to the Dead,” her collection’s titular poem, is an elegy to Thomas, who lived in the village and is buried in its graveyard.

It’s a long poem and includes interesting biographical information. It describes all the drinking that went on, Thomas’ appreciation for Roberts’ knowledge of birdsong, and his funeral. Here’s an excerpt:

At the grave, dug so many feet deep, by the gravedigger
Known to us both, the Laugharne owl staring from the yew,
You staring. And O I must tell you he had a hard time picking
At those rocks. The stone face refused to yield
To give her young Bard so soon a bed.
I saw Louis in the shade as his tears fell.
And past them all as they gathered round the pub
This time I had no need to drink against my will

The “Louis” here was Louis MacNeice, another notable poet who has fallen out of print and who, like Thomas, died too young from alcoholism.

In some poems, Roberts writes poignantly from the perspective of the homefront during war. One previously uncollected poem, “Displaced Person,” is published here with a note made by Eliot at the bottom of the page: “Rough but interesting.” Another standout is “The Temple Road,” where the smell of a carpenter’s paint brings back memories of a wartime bombing in London.

War is also the subject of her modernist epic “Gods with Stainless Ears,” and she wrote it with the idea, somewhat ahead of its time, of its being accompanied by film. It has a mythical feeling to it, but much of it is confusingly dense. She’s thrown just about everything in here, from a Singer sewing machine to a pair of lovers visiting the fourth dimension.

McGuinness notes that both Eliot and Graves had reservations about this epic, but that Roberts stood her ground. He describes her reply to Graves as “remarkable for its self-assurance.” But reading it, you feel the need of a ruthless editorial hand and a longer revision process. As it was, Eliot didn’t publish it until six years after its completion, by which time World War II was over and the national mood had changed.

A Letter to the Dead is an intriguing collection and will be a great addition to the serious home library. Reading it straight through, however, feels a bit like crossing the Laugharne graveyard in search of Roberts’ gypsy caravan. You move through with a posture of reverence, but much seems superseded. Then, suddenly, delightfully, you find yourself invited into a carefully curated inner world — a lustrous gem of a poem, like this one, entitled “Saint Swithin’s Pool”:

I’ll not wash now Mam
The big red earth will
Rise in my face as I
Open the drill...
I’ll wash tonight.
And he died and lay
In the drill and the big
Red earth covered his face;
And he said this Saint Swithin
Now I am dead I can have
My wash, and it rained this day,
Next, and every day since.

*****

“Breathe out like a bike with a slow puncture” advises the yoga teacher in the titular poem of Miles Burrows’ new collection, Slow Puncture (Carcanet Poetry). As he listens to the instructor’s voice, “her words are like spring water.” But afterward, in a dark street, he finds her talking on her phone and, in his confusion, thinks to offer her a ride, “forgetting I have no car/And my bicycle has no light.”

This collection of “incidental verse” and anecdotes is really about the slow puncture of stripping away pretentions. The poem “Music Room” isn’t about music so much as about knowing when to cough between movements. The wheelchairs parked together underneath the trees so the elderly can nap are really about giving the caregivers a break.

Then, there’s the “Winterfest do,” formerly called the Christmas party, where:

(Senior partner who was trying to sack Dr X)
Was dancing opposite Briony Smallgarden
Who was moving her pelvis as if controlling
A trotting horse on a short lead in dressage
Dr X sat at the table. The men were in a group together
Ottoline’s husband (Jez) did not dance at all.
Mel’s husband danced about once.
The men tended not to dance.
They talked about laying patios.

Reading this book is like finding yourself fortuitously engaged in conversation with an elderly gent on the outskirts of a dreadful party. His charming anecdotes may ramble, but he’s savvier than he looks, and he’s been around long enough to see behind façades.

Another witty poem is “For Death, Press One,” a parody of automated answering messages along the lines of Simon Armitage’s “Thank You for Waiting.”

Then, in “Spleen,” cutting through pretentions becomes double-edged, and Burrows doesn’t mind poking fun at himself. A young Turkish doctor who “Is feeling my armpits/ as you might feel for your watch under a cushion, or some elusive memory, will not stop looking there till he finds it.” He finds a pea-sized tumor, but it turns out they really intend to remove the patient’s spleen. What do you need your spleen for anyway, the doctor asks. “It is an essential ingredient of the Romantic Poet,” he replies.

Yes, poetry also comes in for a bit of a dig. There’s the poetry group whose facilitator keeps all the participants in politically correct order. “Her poem is a model of good taste/She reads it, then clenches her jaw as if expecting a blow.” Another poetry workshop is “A terrible banging of spoons on the far side of the moon.”

Slow Puncture is a witty and refreshing collection of loosely structured poems. There are no superfluous flourishes. They haven’t been tweaked or tampered with. Instead, they seem to emerge from whole cloth, and Burrows trusts them enough to leave them as they are, take it or leave it.                       

*****

Finally, let me give a shout-out to a little palate-cleanser of a book from Lost Telegram Press, Cul-de-Sac Diaries by Peter J. Dellolio. One hundred short, surrealist poems are collected here, one to each page, as Andre Breton might have it, “dictated by the thought, in the absence of any controlled exercise of reason.”

I’ve written recently about surrealism as a response to the chaos of the times. It might not be a panacea, but here it is a respite, since Dellolio’s brand of surrealism is pleasingly visual and never veers into the macabre.

If you could do with a reset, let me suggest opening this little book at random and letting one of its declarative titles confidently lead you into a poem. There, it will let you go to wander freely through non sequiturs and surprising juxtapositions, to lift you up and put you down lightly in a different place.

Here is one called “CALMING REPETITION”:

Calming repetition of
The waves
under
moonlight.

Nothing was broken.

Immensely pleased
guests strolling
around the chateau
in velvet tuxedos
and satin
evening
gowns.

As we struggle to make sense of the world, Dellolio invites us to forget about it for a moment and relax in the assurance that, occasionally, it just doesn’t.

Amanda Holmes Duffy is a columnist and poetry editor for the Independent and the voice of “Read Me a Poem,” a podcast of the American Scholar.