Letter from Wales

The Spring 2025 number of Poetry Wales celebrates the magazine’s sixtieth birthday. To mark the occasion, it features contributions from sixty new poets and reviews by writers who have connections with the magazine extending back almost as far as its now distant origins.

A long time ago the founder and first editor, Meic Stephens, gave me copies of the earliest issues from his personal collection. The title page of ‘Number One – Spring 1965’ carries the information that it is ‘published twice a year by THE TRISKEL PRESS at Garth Newydd, Merthyr Tydfil, in Glamorgan’. At that point the magazine had only eighteen pages and the ‘Press’ was an imaginary construct. In 1962, newly graduated in French at UCW Aberystwyth, Meic had found a teaching post at the grammar school in Ebbw Vale, a forbidding twenty-two miles uphill from his Taff-side home in Trefforest, near Pontypridd. He was already a Plaid Cymru activist, and that may well have encouraged him to join a small group with similar political engagement living at the Merthyr property, not to mention halving the distance to work. ‘Radio Free Wales’ briefly broadcast from the attic to a couple of neighbouring streets. Rumoured to have been built for an industrialist, Garth Newydd may have been neglected and run down, but it was a spacious three-storey building for like-minded occupants and, conveniently (remarkably!), had no known owner. Just in case, they put aside a weekly sum for rent, which was never collected.

So Poetry Wales (the title inspired by Poetry Ireland) began, in the month of May, with no subsidy, no moneyed backer. The ...