Enacting memory and grief in poetic landscapes

Much geographical work has focused on sites of memory, where memories and grief are inherently tied to particular places, monuments and landscapes. Memories and grief can also, however, be spatially and temporally dispersed and fragmentary and can create landscapes in which things are simultaneously present and absent. In this paper I trace the creation of a memorial poem - a marwnad - for my great aunt, who had lived her entire life on the margins of Cors Goch, a raised lowland bog in rural south-west Wales, as part of a long elegiac tradition in Welsh-language poetry. Like many Welsh marwnadau, the poem highlights the spatial and temporal complexities of memory, emotion and grief. They are both inherently tied to shifting, ephemeral, fluid landscapes and politicised in changing regional and national cultural landscapes, speaking to the decline of rural communities and the Welsh language. As well as reflecting the temporality and seasonality of site-specific memory and grief, the poem contributes to that temporality as memories resurface and intensify during composition and in subsequent personal readings. I discuss the implications of such poetic grieving and memory-making, relationships with the landscape, absence and presence, and the place of such performative poetry in mapping grief.