This cornucopia offers up the harvest of a century’s worth of versifying by a hundred poets, running from W.H.Davies, born in 1871 to Owen Sheers, born in 1974.  Poetry 1900-2000 also stands as yet another testament to the Stakhanovite energies of its editor, the indefatigable and boundlessly productive Meic Stephens, who has produced, by now, not just one but two whole centuries of books, as they now number over two hundred titles.

 

This anthology, with its elegant potted histories of the poets, shot through with Stephens’ perceptive take on their work, can stand proudly on the bookshelf next to the Companion to Welsh Literature and the various Artist in Wales compendia and the bite sized Corgi poets series and so on. It offers a judicious selection from an art form that is deeply in ingrained in the Welsh consciousness, indeed some go as far as suggest it has been pivotal in shaping it…