Unless She Beckons: Poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym

translated by Paul Merchant and Michael Faletra

(Redbat Books, 2018)

The Greatest Poet of Medieval Wales

A brilliant and canny poet of love, Dafydd ap Gwilym (fl. mid-14th century) explores the intensity of erotic desire: its deep seriousness as well as its deep comedy.  Although distant in time and circumstance, Dafydd's work confronts us with a virtuosic strangeness, a directness, and a sense of lived reality.  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 both coy and confident, his poetry continues to beckon.

The translation is available here from Oregon's Redbat Press, or here at Powells.com,  or here on Amazon.com.