Cynefin

Cynefin is one of those strange Welsh words, like hierath, that is very hard to translate. The simplest explanation is that it means a natural environment. So, for example, you might say that a camel is in its cynefin in the desert, or a koala up a gum tree. But cynefin can also be applied to humans to mean the place where you are most comfortable. It can even be turned into a verb to mean the act of settling into a new home or job.

It also means a sheep track.

And none of this is quite what Carwyn Graves means when he chose the word as the title of his new book.

Graves, for those of you not familiar with his work, is first and foremost and agriculturalist. He is an expert on Welsh apple varieties (of which there are many, he has written a book). But he has become more and more interested in the relationship between the Welsh people and their land, and in this book he explores how they have expressed that connection through poetry.

Diversion: Welsh poetry. You are probably familiar with the concept of haiku—a Japanese poetry form with a very strict structure. That, dear reader, is nothing compared to Welsh poetry. The englyn (pl. englynion) is a form of Welsh poem that has enough rules to require a lifetime of study from the budding bard. So yes, syllables must be counted. But rhyme is also important, and stress and alliteration. It is all to do with cynghanedd. I won’t pretend to understand how it all works.

In his book, which is subtitled Wisdom from a Thousand Years of Welsh Nature Poetry, Graves takes us on a tour of poets from Taliesin through Dafydd ap Gwilym to R S Thomas, interrogating how their poetry is informed by a connection to the land and stands in opposition to, you guessed it, the English, who manage to get it all wrong.

The trouble with English nature poetry (not just you, Wordsworth, but you are a fine example) is that it is all about the poet as observer. There is a sort of Cartesian dualism to it that abstracts the poet from the subject and lays claim to a position of intellectual observation. In Welsh nature poetry, Graves argues, poet and nature are one. The poet lives in nature, works in nature, and is in communion with nature.

Eventually this takes us all the way to technology and smart phones and the utter disconnect that people these days have from the natural world. If we want to save the planet, Graves is arguing, we need to be more Welsh. Or at least get in touch with nature the way that a Welsh poet would.

He’s not entirely correct in his arguments. Graves puts a lot of the blame on the Enlightenment, and certainly this is where our current obsession with neutral standpoints, objective observation and so on derives from. But the Enlightenment was the way it was because of a rediscovery of the philosophical and scientific thought of the ancient world, in particular Classical Athens. In other words, it is all your fault, Aristotle, you misogynist creep.

But having said that, Graves is pretty much spot on with his conclusion. We do need to live more in contact with our environment. You can’t have a cynefin that is a sterile, chrome-and-plastic-walled space station in which everyone eats nutrient bars 3D-printed by machines and remain human. Also Graves writes beautifully, and the window he opens onto the complexities of Welsh poetry provides a view on a deep and tempting rabbit hole of research. Cynefin: you’ll feel at home with it.

Title: Cynefin
By: Carwyn Graves
Publisher: Calon
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura