Hiraeth: In Search of Celtic Origins

Louise E. Allin, a poet and short-story writer, is also an English instructor at Cambrian College.

This charming production of type, recycled beige paper, and colorful
textured cover, interspersed with a collage of photos, is art inside and
out, a 25-year chronicle of Beryl Baigent’s Celtic origins. Her verse
is lyrical, charged with inspiring images of a struggle to survive in a
land challenged by geography, economics, and politics.

To her beloved Wales, Baigent is both lover and historian, and in her
hands the abandoned pits teem with life again. The headframes razed to
rubble to make room for new factories: “This place is unimportant /
only to those who have never / heard the hooter blast or / smelled the
pit smoke.” Here are live parents, grandparents, and children caring
for each other in the tradition of cymortha, “sharing the gossip, the
deaths, the singing / Knowing the primroses, the pit-smoke, the pain.”


The introductory passages for the five divisions (Sacred Places, Earth
Mother, Sky Father, Music and Dance, and the Otherworld) put into
perspective the cosmography and mythology of her people in the tradition
of Spoon River Anthology, as each character enters her stage, beginning
with Grandmother in “knitted shawl and flannel nightie ... shade and
shelter.” Healing hands and symbolic circles weave realism with
enchantment, present with past, the changing image of the train as
whale. Fertility goddesses, old religion blended with new in the
mystical shadows of a sacred well, virgin, mother, and crone journey
“through the showering portal / to our common source to our / unbroken
genesis.” Bent men with wheelbarrows sing hallelujahs through the
village as she walks with her father, the Pleiades tearing off their
“ice skirts above.” She remembers Aberystywth and Dylan Thomas,
mourning the lost children of Aberfan who perished in the slag heap
collapse. Her book is subtitled “In Search of Celtic Origins,” and
as the joyous sounds of the Eisteddfodau—the legendary competition for
music, dance, and poetry—ring out, clearly these origins were never
lost.