AN INTRODUCTION BY THE GUEST EDITOR OF SLOPE #8 by Peter Finch It was about thirty years ago that cracks in the centralised uniformity of British literature first began to appear. Publishers were on the move out of London and regional accents were becoming acceptable. The Irish cause was on the rise. Scotland had emerged again into literary magnificence. On the Celtic margins of the English state one other country felt that this was the time to try its hand. At least seven of the signatories of U.S. Declaration of Independence had come from Wales.Why, with its ancient traditions, was it still one of the least known countries in the world? The poet Dannie Abse approached an American publisher with an anthology of what was at the time known as Anglo-Welsh poetry - poetry written by Welsh authors but in the English rather than the Welsh tongue. This is much better than the Irish, he declared. But the publishers were not interested. The works don't hold together, they told him. They are not different enough, there's nothing here to mark them as particularly Welsh. They might as well be written by bards from Somerset. A few years later poets Roland Mathias and Raymond Garlick noted something similar in the content of Anglo-Welsh Poetry 1480-1980, their all-embracing anthology of the period. The flavour of Welshness in the more recent works had become diluted. Its direction and distinctiveness had become hard to discern. But those writers who worked in the Welsh language itself suffered no such identity problems. The use of Welsh itself imparted distinctiveness. There was no need to bother to think in specific cultural directions; the native tongue breaking on the page was identity enough. But the world - and especially the literary world - has always been subject to dramatic upset. In 1999 Wales took a huge turn for change by voting itself part- way to independence from English state and establishing the National Assembly for Wales, the first parliament since Owain Glyndwr's assembly at Machynlleth in 1406. National consciousness rose palpably. The aching divides between the two language communities had bridges strung across them. Poets emerged as national icons - Nigel Jenkins, Gillian Clarke, Ifor ap Glyn, Twm Morys and Gwyneth Lewis, among others - and showed themselves willing and able to make their verse reflect Wales's new bi-cultural, bi-lingual and increasingly self-reliant state. If Abse re-edited his anthology today and took it back to Scribners or whoever its individual celtic voice would be blazingly obvious. Mathias and Garlick would note a new unity among their contemporary contributors. The elder tradition - Welsh language poetry with its historical traces back to Aneirin's Gododdin in the sixth century, although only accessible at first hand to 500,000 or so of Wales' 3,000,000 population - had now become relevant again to the people as a whole. The selection of poetry you read here - drawn from the cream of Welsh poetry practitioners - is as broad as we could make it. The hard-line traditionalists lie down with the graphic based experimenters and the strict meter masters stand next to the freest of the formless. This is Wales as it is, rather than as some literateurs would have us believe it might be. Spot its strengths and enjoy its poetry and once you've done that go tell someone else. "For Wales, see England," it used to say in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. That era is over. We're moving on. I'd like to thank my Deputy at the Academi, Ceri Anwen James, for sourcing the Welsh language poetry we've included and for arranging its translation. Everything else, errors and successes, is down to me. Peter Finch is a poet and short fiction writer. He was born in Cardiff, where he still lives. He currently runs Academi, the Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency. His books include Useful, Make, Poems for Ghosts and Food, which appears from Seren later this year.