Poetry review – ARRIVING BAREFOOTED: Stuart Henson enjoys a collection by Gwen Williams which deals with 19th century attempts to establish a new homeland for the Welsh in Patagonia
Arriving Barefooted
Gwen Williams
Cinnamon Press 2026
ISBN 9781788648585
64pp £9.99
Historically, the Welsh have had a hard time, and this little bi-lingual book attests to that. It’s not the pit owners—or the accursed English—at the root of it in this instance: it’s God again. Well, not God exactly, but religion, that old bugbear, and poverty which drove the early Welsh settlers to South America from their home. The ‘Two Rough Journeys’ recounted here are those of the non-conformists who sailed south to Patagonia in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, and the follow-up made by the author 150 years later. It’s stony ground out there, a terrain that some readers may have crossed with the hero of Richard Llewellyn’s novel Up Into the Singing Mountain. And if Plan A, from Williams’s poem “Self-exile”, is anything to go by, the usual suspects have to bear at least some of the responsibility:
Plan A—Palestine.
illages with names of chapels
in Bala—Bethel, Hebron,
Nebo and sites in the Galilean
desert calling us to flee
the Church of England and
‘Welsh Not’ and landlords
who threw us out of hovels
for not making the rent
they kept raising.
In the end, the exiles settled on their ‘Plan C’ which was probably marginally safer than Palestine, but not without its problems. On the first journey we wander the Patagonian wastes with a cast that includes the Rev Aaron Jenkins and his more practical wife Rachel, attend their services…
…A box for a pulpit
with the Bible and Hymn Book placed upon it.
We sat on dusty hessian and matched hymns to tunes
by counting the measure on our fingers.
The first sermon was ‘Israel in the Desert.’
…and witness the wedding of the delightfully monikered Edwyn Cynrig Roberts and Ann Jones. In “The Long Trek to Find Gold” Edwyn prophesies ‘a green valley like the ones at home’, rich with corn, lakes ‘jumping with fish’. Needless to say the reality is less idyllic. Williams is good at the ironic plain statement, and she has a painter’s eye for colour-as-image—the chameleons with their ‘tones and shadows waning and warming’, and, in the second section, two canoes in ‘like green / and yellow leaves / in the shallows together.’
Her readers will also admire the economy of “Seth Jones”, in which a whole narrative is compressed into an exchange of correspondence between men who probably weren’t in the habit of writing long letters. Their language is touchingly plain and their emotions sincere:
Goodbye dear Jones I will likely meet you
again but in heaven. Goodbye, from David
Lloyd your friend at Capel Seion.
Dear Lloyd I am still alive despite
the hardships. Thank you for worrying
about me. We landed at Bahia Nueva
shoeless into an empty desert …
The poet, herself something of an exile, (She grew up in Salford in a chapel-going Welsh speaking family) is well-placed to chronicle the travails of her countrywomen (and men) and the bilingual presentation of the poems is part of the message. My guess is that the English versions may have come first, but despite having a Welsh-speaking mother-in-law and a copy of the Welsh Hymnal at home, I’m not really qualified to judge their relative merits. The Welsh poems look impressive to me, and close in form and substance to their English sisters. Here, for a taster, is the ending of “Hela am y Gwningen Lladdwrol Patagoniaidd” (“Hunting for the Patagonian Killer Bunny”)
Dim ond grensian biscetaidd
fy nhraed fy hun fel tinitys
ar y llawr caregog.
Only the biscuit crunch
of my own feet like tinnitus
on the stony ground.
A last stanza that is in both languages like haiku in the tautness of its imagery. (I wonder, incidentally, how the Welsh might translate ‘haiku’. Englyn Siapanaidd?)
There are plenty of ironically observed moments in the second part of Arriving Barefooted, like this one from “St David’s Day in Capel Bethel in the Andes”
Two hours in the boiling chapel
for them to show off their Welsh credentials and
we raised the roof with A ti y Gloria
Can you ever be Welsh and an atheist, asked William
as we went outside to see a pile of bricks—
the new Welsh primary school in the Andes
they told us—at least if the funds arrive from the Senedd.
The twenty-first century journey is, perhaps inevitably, a little less compelling than the early one. Williams’s fellow-travellers’ “Catastrophe at Los Altares” is a water-pump failure and a broken hotel room-lock, but the vicissitudes are chronicled with economy and a mordant wit. The rowdiness, rudeness and rugby limericks of the Welsh Gogs and Hwntws aren’t spared either.
Gogs and Hwntws? You’ll have to buy or borrow the book to find out.
Aug 5 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Gwen Williams
Poetry review – ARRIVING BAREFOOTED: Stuart Henson enjoys a collection by Gwen Williams which deals with 19th century attempts to establish a new homeland for the Welsh in Patagonia
Arriving Barefooted
Gwen Williams
Cinnamon Press 2026
ISBN 9781788648585
64pp £9.99
Historically, the Welsh have had a hard time, and this little bi-lingual book attests to that. It’s not the pit owners—or the accursed English—at the root of it in this instance: it’s God again. Well, not God exactly, but religion, that old bugbear, and poverty which drove the early Welsh settlers to South America from their home. The ‘Two Rough Journeys’ recounted here are those of the non-conformists who sailed south to Patagonia in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, and the follow-up made by the author 150 years later. It’s stony ground out there, a terrain that some readers may have crossed with the hero of Richard Llewellyn’s novel Up Into the Singing Mountain. And if Plan A, from Williams’s poem “Self-exile”, is anything to go by, the usual suspects have to bear at least some of the responsibility:
Plan A—Palestine.
illages with names of chapels
in Bala—Bethel, Hebron,
Nebo and sites in the Galilean
desert calling us to flee
the Church of England and
‘Welsh Not’ and landlords
who threw us out of hovels
for not making the rent
they kept raising.
In the end, the exiles settled on their ‘Plan C’ which was probably marginally safer than Palestine, but not without its problems. On the first journey we wander the Patagonian wastes with a cast that includes the Rev Aaron Jenkins and his more practical wife Rachel, attend their services…
…A box for a pulpit
with the Bible and Hymn Book placed upon it.
We sat on dusty hessian and matched hymns to tunes
by counting the measure on our fingers.
The first sermon was ‘Israel in the Desert.’
…and witness the wedding of the delightfully monikered Edwyn Cynrig Roberts and Ann Jones. In “The Long Trek to Find Gold” Edwyn prophesies ‘a green valley like the ones at home’, rich with corn, lakes ‘jumping with fish’. Needless to say the reality is less idyllic. Williams is good at the ironic plain statement, and she has a painter’s eye for colour-as-image—the chameleons with their ‘tones and shadows waning and warming’, and, in the second section, two canoes in ‘like green / and yellow leaves / in the shallows together.’
Her readers will also admire the economy of “Seth Jones”, in which a whole narrative is compressed into an exchange of correspondence between men who probably weren’t in the habit of writing long letters. Their language is touchingly plain and their emotions sincere:
Goodbye dear Jones I will likely meet you
again but in heaven. Goodbye, from David
Lloyd your friend at Capel Seion.
Dear Lloyd I am still alive despite
the hardships. Thank you for worrying
about me. We landed at Bahia Nueva
shoeless into an empty desert …
The poet, herself something of an exile, (She grew up in Salford in a chapel-going Welsh speaking family) is well-placed to chronicle the travails of her countrywomen (and men) and the bilingual presentation of the poems is part of the message. My guess is that the English versions may have come first, but despite having a Welsh-speaking mother-in-law and a copy of the Welsh Hymnal at home, I’m not really qualified to judge their relative merits. The Welsh poems look impressive to me, and close in form and substance to their English sisters. Here, for a taster, is the ending of “Hela am y Gwningen Lladdwrol Patagoniaidd” (“Hunting for the Patagonian Killer Bunny”)
Dim ond grensian biscetaidd
fy nhraed fy hun fel tinitys
ar y llawr caregog.
Only the biscuit crunch
of my own feet like tinnitus
on the stony ground.
A last stanza that is in both languages like haiku in the tautness of its imagery. (I wonder, incidentally, how the Welsh might translate ‘haiku’. Englyn Siapanaidd?)
There are plenty of ironically observed moments in the second part of Arriving Barefooted, like this one from “St David’s Day in Capel Bethel in the Andes”
Two hours in the boiling chapel
for them to show off their Welsh credentials and
we raised the roof with A ti y Gloria
Can you ever be Welsh and an atheist, asked William
as we went outside to see a pile of bricks—
the new Welsh primary school in the Andes
they told us—at least if the funds arrive from the Senedd.
The twenty-first century journey is, perhaps inevitably, a little less compelling than the early one. Williams’s fellow-travellers’ “Catastrophe at Los Altares” is a water-pump failure and a broken hotel room-lock, but the vicissitudes are chronicled with economy and a mordant wit. The rowdiness, rudeness and rugby limericks of the Welsh Gogs and Hwntws aren’t spared either.
Gogs and Hwntws? You’ll have to buy or borrow the book to find out.