This week’s poem is from a chapbook of intense yet rangy ecopoems, Watershed by Ruth Padel. Connecting the lively and varied angles of reflection on the subject of water, realism is the primary value, but it’s expressed without being wrung of its own magical dimension. The work has the characteristic balance of literary artistry, casual grace and scientific knowledge that distinguishes Padel’s work. That the term watershed itself denotes a physical phenomenon as well as being a popular colloquialism for a crucial moment is indicative. Stone’s prompt, the editorial call-out for poems on “seconds”, coincided with her interest in a concept that apparently preceded the introduction of street lighting. She explains: “I was aware from a poem I wrote about Pepys that in the 18th century it was common for people to conduct all sorts of business, in and out of the bedroom, in the intervals between sleeps. As an accomplished insomniac, I have plenty of experience of night-time lucidity, and I have observed that the majority of my most vivid dreams happen in the pre-dawn slice of somnolence. I wrote this poem in the aftermath of my mother dying, just after Christmas 2021, which coincided with me getting Covid, which is still with me in its postviral state, and produces a lot of very weird mental processes and sleep issues, among other things.” Yet this estrangement when examined in a poem can become a different and sharpened way of seeing. Williams’s characteristically laconic wit and casual tone are apparent in the poems of Lines Off, but the vision is at times more surreal, perhaps closer to that of the 20th-century poets of eastern and central Europe, such as Vasko Popa. Arthritic and tubercular, Tristan Corbière (1845-75) had a short, often dismal life. His single collection, Les Amours Jaunes, was “published at the author’s expense”. The poète maudit (as Verlaine dubbed him) seems to have discovered a kindred spirit in the toad: at least, he had nailed the dried-out corpse of one above the mantelpiece in the family home. I first discovered the poetry of the 14th-century Welsh bard Dafydd ap Gwilym when, planning a poem about my roof-nesting herring-gull family, I cast around the internet for company and ideas. I was thrilled by the radiance of the poem I discovered, Yr Wylan: Gwilym’s seagull soars, alive and shining, even in English translation.

This week’s choice is an abridged version of another great Dafydd ap Gwilym poem, Morfudd Like the Sun (Morfudd fel yr Haul). With this commentary by the scholar, translator and editor, M Wynn Thomas, the Morfudd sampling would be an ideal introduction for readers new to Gwilym’s work. Lines Off, the 2019 collection by Hugo Williams, explores among a variety of themes the poet’s experiences of kidney disease and dialysis, followed by a successful kidney transplant in 2014. “Lines off” is a stage direction, indicating when an actor’s words are to be spoken off-stage or off-camera. It’s a title that gestures towards the writer’s theatrical family connections, a rich autobiographical source he has often mined in poetry, but in the present context, it also symbolises the reverse of such intimacy. Illness seems to sideline the sufferer from the real “action” of their own existence. As patients we seem to become less visible to others and to ourselves. The third day God saw what was emerging beneath him. The green mist and undulation of land and water: Its modulated rhythm and irritability of split forms Spitting up from the earth's face massed fronds And circular prisms of light. These he watched, startled, until there evolved The springing, active branches of varied leaves, Plants, shrubs and trees. A dishevelled array; A residue of years impelling change of growth. The reptiles unknown to him but already in birth Peered at his curiosity and their own under a Blanching light. The mammals also secure on The tree of life and hidden by its enormous branches of Passing mystery, clutched the young to their breasts.Pool is from the New Poems section of Rowan Williams’s Collected Poems. As well as the Waldo Williams translation mentioned earlier, Poem of the week has previously featured Rowan Williams’s poem about the Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev. Now other metaphorical shapes appear. The sun is “God’s ball”: it also has a mysterious, special “fringe”. The metaphors are given more space and separation in the original, but there’s something to be said for the clustering in the shortened version. The sun after all is no simple object. No one can hold it steady. It can change shape radically as the eye perceives it at different times of day and through various kinds of weather.

Despite the heat of all this, Crane keeps his founding imagery under control. Mirroring has been extended to repeated sacrificial action. The silence of the mirror seems sharpened by the new term, “unwhispering”. The mirror’s power of silence remains crucial and again there’s an impression that it isn’t entirely trustworthy. This is all a matter of belief rather than fact. Again, Gwilym avoids the self-centred lyric rhetoric of an Elizabethan sonneteer or Romantic love poet. Gwilym’s voice always sound natural, even at its most elevated. Here, the diction is flatter, plainer. Even temporary absence is a state of dull, starless loss.Observation and detachment, sympathy and distaste, forge the inner conflict the poem confronts in its last lines. “I want them gone. I want to be absolved” is a line hard and glittering in its frankness, and in depicting the incompatibility of the two desires. This is followed by an immediate shift to the niggling practicalities – “Shall I give some coins to each of them?” It is at the level of finding an answer to this kind of question, moral and pragmatic, that the urge to action begins to die of exhaustion: “If it were only one, or just one day … ” Such ambiguities make it a compelling couplet, in which the silences are themselves mirrored. The underlying thought regarding the mirror is that it can’t tell tales, as it doesn’t keep any impression of what it reflects, in this case the “realities” that “plunge” nearby. The verb “plunge” implies turbulence, probably sexual. Silence in the sense of “not telling” conceals but doesn’t suppress the “realities”. There’s an ominously placed line-break between the third and fourth lines of the second verse: “tolled” takes the emphasis, and is repeated in the first line of verse three. The bell seems solidly installed “between the cold and dark”. But something changes. The narrator comments on the quality of the bird’s song (“a clear true voice he had”) and perhaps it’s envy that prompts the bell’s response. We’re not told how its pitch or pace are altered – only that the narrator “knew it” (the bell) “had gone mad”. It is the first poem in a delightful new 12-poem collection, A Map of Love, which Wynn Thomas has edited for the University of Wales Press. The bilingual collection hops across the centuries from Gwilym to the present, and includes stylish linocuts by the artist, Ruth Jên Evans. It would make a good Valentine’s Day gift, and, if you’re Welsh, you’d only be a little late to offer the collection to a loved one in honour of St Dwynwen, the patron saint of love, whose day was celebrated on 25 January. His poem, Le Crapaud, an inverted sonnet, has its own sour fun with voice and tone, but Forshaw goes further, seizing the opportunity for a rich brew of English and American-English slang, with terms such as “gob”, “dekko”, “buggered off”, “old toady-boyo”, clobbering the ear with melancholy-merry gusto.