Looking back through fresh eyes

Writer Dai Smith has published his debut poetry collection at the age of 80 – and it was worth waiting for, writes Jenny White

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DAI SMITH'S writing career kicked off in earnest in 1980 with the publication of The Fed, a history of the south Wales miners in the 20th century, which he co-authored with Hywel Francis.

That same year, he also co-wrote Fields of Praise, a history of the Welsh Rugby Union, with Gareth Williams.

Now, aged 80, he has birthed another two books in the same year: Measuring the Distance, a collection of work spanning historical essays, interviews, polemical pieces and fiction, and Street Fighting and Other Past Times, his debut poetry collection.

Street Fighting and Other Past Times sprang, almost by accident, out of ideas that were fermented by Measuring the Distance.

"I finished that and intended to put the pen down, but then a poem popped into my head," he says. "One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I had written about 40 of them, and so I had a collection," he says.

"The essays and various prose pieces are an expectation of what I've been up to over a lifetime; the poetry is more an emotional pulse, a compression of dreams tied up into moments and epiphanies, and I surprised myself with them."

While his career has been strongly literature focussed - beginning with earning a degree in New York focusing on 20th Century American and British poets - this sudden burst of poetry was unprecedented.