Alonenesses

William Wootten

• BuyA Cypress Walk: Letters to ‘Frieda’ by Alun Lewis
  Enitharmon, 224 pp, £20.00, October 2006, ISBN 1 904634 30 3

Alun Lewis is usually remembered as a war poet or, more precisely, as a soldier poet. ‘All Day It Has Rained’ is familiar to those who know nothing else about its author and to some who don’t usually read poetry. Ian Hamilton edited a selection of Lewis’s work, and there is a good biography by John Pikoulis. But his achievement has been hard to focus on. He moved quickly as a poet, and the poetry he wrote while on home service is markedly different from that written after his arrival in India in December 1942. There are also short stories, among the best of the Second World War, and there are the letters. The letters have had a following since a small selection was included in the prose collection In the Green Tree (1948): ‘It may be,’ Walter Allen wrote in the New Statesman, ‘that these letters will ultimately take a higher place than either the poetry or the stories for, like Keats’s, they point to a maturity beyond anything their author had been able to express in his work.’ A heavily edited selection of his letters to Gweno Lewis appeared in 1989, in Alun Lewis: Letters to My Wife.