Unless She Beckons

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.