The Seren Poetry Podcast · Alternative Stories

Nerys Williams: 'Republic'

·44 min·4 clips

Nerys Williams dissects attacks on the Welsh language with satirical humor and an appalled fascination in her prose poems.

Republic arrives through place, music, and memory. Nerys Williams is introduced as a poet from a Welsh-speaking Carmarthenshire community, now tied to poetry and poetics in Dublin. The collection looks back, but it does not hurry the past into a neat story. Class, culture, West Wales, post-punk sound, and indie labels all feed into it. The craft talk has a pleasingly practical edge. Williams explains the twenty-line section rule, a limit that slowly opened the project up. It also made the editing sharper. Longer sections had to be gathered, cut, tightened, and made to sit properly on the page. Even proofreading became tricky. The host catches how that same twenty-line shape can feel roomy or squeezed, depending on how the sentences move. Then Gwynfarr changes the mood. The poem starts with music, days, a political poster, parental hands, and a child beginning to understand what language can carry. It is private, but it has public weather around it. Welsh is not decorative here. It lives with immersion heaters, Christmas presents, laundry, correction, and night-time humming. Political history comes through a child's image, with the named figure first seeming benign and later understood through hunger strike. The conversation circles back to representation. Williams wants to resist the usual flattening of Wales and treat bilingualism as power. The ending stays quiet. The host takes that in as a learner and as someone living in Wales, and the episode leaves space for attention rather than argument.

As heard by us

A thoughtful poetry interview where process, place, and Welsh identity stay closely tied.

Nerys Williams's Republic stays close to west Wales, where class, culture, community, and bilingual identity all shape the conversation. It traces the making of the collection with care, moving through post-punk memory, devolution-era change in Wales, and the discipline of…

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Why you'd press play

For a quiet, process-led talk about poetry, Wales, and Republic.

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