Babble: a poetry collection exploring the cultural identity of modern Wales

Babble is a poetry collection that adapts the Welsh metrical tradition in English. The poetry exhibits characteristics of cynghanedd to explore varying perspectives on a modern Welsh cultural identity. Its main aim is to show how a hyphenated identity might be reconsidered to engage with ‒ and represent ‒ individuals struggling to establish a strong Welsh identification. The poetry collection has been influenced by Welsh history, its landscape and literature. It recreates a learning process that took me on a journey through Wales which strengthened my Welsh identity. The collection explores cultural identity through underrepresented female narratives from Welsh history, literature and mythology. My critical essay analyses why poets believed the craft of cynghanedd to be important to their identity and how they applied its techniques in their poetry. A creative methodology has been implemented in a poetry collection that imitates and responds to literature from the twelfth to the twenty-first century. It was critical to have a flexible creative process when writing cynghanedd in English. My poetry looks at modernist poetry and the craft of cynghanedd to develop a new style of poetry that could engage with a diversity of voices in modern Wales. The main aim of the collection was to engage readers with the craft of cynghanedd. This would prompt them to explore its connection to Wales. The collection considered ways that would provoke readers to question their ideas on identity in modern Wales.

Geographesis, or the Afterlife of Britain in Chaucer

Through a close reading of several of the Canterbury Tales (but especially the Franklin’s Tale), this chapter maps the glimmers of British (especially Welsh) history within Geoffrey Chaucer’s Anglocentric narrative ambit. The inquiry is framed through the use of postcolonial anthropology and ecomaterialism, and discussion returns repeatedly to how humans compose narratives with and on stone (menhirs, monoliths, Stonehenge), especially because stone’s duration is so vast. A major focus of the chapter is Chaucer’s unspoken debt to the twelfth-century British historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, who stands at the commencement of the Arthur myth that Chaucer so often dismisses as dead or long past. Stone ensures that this history endures.

The Hirlas Horn of Henr Tudor – Which One?

This article explores one significant aspect of the historiography of the tradition surrounding Henry Tudor's march through Wales to Bosworth and how a Carmarthenshire family, the Vaughans of Golden Grove, enhanced and promoted their gentry status, image and loyalty to the Crown by acquiring and displaying and then later replicating what became known as the Hirlas Horn. The Vaughans thereby engaged with the history of Wales to their own advantage by retrospectively inventing their family's involvement in the Bosworth legends and traditions associated with this important part of Welsh history.

The Hirlas Horn of Henry Tudor – Which One?

This article explores one significant aspect of the historiography of the tradition surrounding Henry Tudor's march through Wales to Bosworth and how a Carmarthenshire family, the Vaughans of Golden Grove, enhanced and promoted their gentry status, image and loyalty to the Crown by acquiring and displaying and then later replicating what became known as the Hirlas Horn. The Vaughans thereby engaged with the history of Wales to their own advantage by retrospectively inventing their family's involvement in the Bosworth legends and traditions associated with this important part of Welsh history.