Unless She Beckons: poems by Dafydd ap Gwilym

The greatest poet of medieval Wales.

A brilliant and canny poet of love, Dafydd ap Gwilym explores the intensity of erotic desire: its deep seriousness as well as its deep comedy. 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.