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I first started writing poetry in my early twenties, when I was a Junior Research Fellow at Oxford with poems about the declining coal mining industry which I remembered from childhood. I read avidly in both languages from an early age, the supremely great prose of the William Morgan Bible in Welsh, many books in Welsh and English, poetry and prose. The Welsh speaking Baptist culture was all around me in this house because my grandfather, Thomas Elim Jones, a coal miner and Prif Ddiacon (Head Deacon), was pious, highly literate, and also a musician, composer, conductor and brass band leader. So instruments and batons and a harmonium littered the room next door to the one in which I am writing now. During school days at Pontardawe Grammar we were taught literature to a high standard, and during undergraduate days I read Dylan Thomas inside out from the Uplands Bookshop that Dylan himself frequented above his cap sized, capsized town. In graduate days I read many novels and collections of poetry. The catalyst which made me start writing poetry was the book H’m by R. S. Thomas which I bought from Blackwell’s, Thomas at his most terse, most angry and most critical of society. As a graduate, my shelves at Cwrt Mawr, Aberystwyth, were lined with novels and poetry books bought from Galloway’s. I first started writing in the Miltonic sonnet style in Welsh and English in the early eighties, when I published in poetry magazines, and that style gradually developed and matured. My mature poetry is in a terse style influenced by the great bards down the ages, and by R. S. Thomas and his merciless honesty. The mature englynion and cywyddau in Welsh are distilled wisdom of seven centuries, using the cynghanedd of my ancestral cousin, Dafydd ap Gwilym, one of the three foremost European poets of the early renaissance.
