The greatest poetic metre you’ve probably never heard of

By Mererid Hopwood, Professor of Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth University

Cast your mind back to August, if you can. As that somewhat sun-less summer drew to an end and we pushed fed-up and forlorn deckchairs back into the shed, in Cardiff a newly acclaimed poet, Carwyn Eckley, proudly unwrapped a rather magnificent chair. His to keep.

He is Wales’s latest chaired prifardd. And while prifardd might be rendered in English as “chief bard” or “chief poet”, the cultural significance of this title is lost in translation – the first of…

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