Unless She Beckons: poems by Dafydd ap Gwilym

Dafydd ap Gwilym was the greatest poet of medieval Wales. A brilliant and canny poet of love, Dafydd explores the intensity of erotic desire: its deep seriousness as well as its deep comedy. Born in Cardiganshire around 1320, he was trained in the Welsh bardic tradition and traveled widely throughout Wales. Although distant in time and circumstance, Dafydd's work confronts us with a virtuosic strangeness, a directness, and a sense of lived realness. In his poems, he lingers outside a village, loiters in the woods waiting for a tryst that never happens, peers through a window, stumbles in the dark. Despite the centuries and the technological gulfs that separate us, Dafydd's world is also our world, and his poems, like the best of all poetry, surprisingly modern. With a voice coy, confident, and continually alluring, his poetry beckons and endures.

Paul Merchant was born in Wales and taught for many years at Warwick University. Since 1988 he has lived in Oregon, where he was Director of the William Stafford Archives in Watzek Library at Lewis & Clark College.

Michael Faletra is Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, where he specializes in the literatures of medieval Britain.