If you were asked to reflect on the last decade of the previous century and assess its poetic production, the name of Gwyneth Lewis would be high on the list in a Welsh context. She is a productive poet - publishing two English-language collections, Parables and Faxes (Bloodaxe, 1995) and Zero Gravity (Bloodaxe, 1998) and three in Welsh, Sonedau Redsa (Gomer, 1990), Cyfrif Un ac Un yn Dri (Barddas, 1996) and her most recent volume, Y Llofrudd Iaith (Barddas, 1999), the latter a detective story in verse. More importantly, Gwyneth Lewis represents one of the freshest, most erudite and confident of poetic voices in Wales today. Confidence is, of course, one of those words often bandied about in cultural discussions, especially post-devolution, as if the Assembly was a dose of feel-good-factor-eight, a sign of sunny times ahead.

So what form does Lewis's confidence take? Well, for one thing she takes her readers and our intellect seriously. She has the confidence to expect us to be able, and intellectually willing, to travel with her in her poetic explorations; and while she is neither hectoring nor didactic she is always engaged in the social or personal conundrum which she is exploring. Nor, for the most part, do we get the impression that she asks a question rhetorically in order flamboyantly to give us the answer. On those occasions when she does exhort her audience directly, she provides not so much an answer as a way of thinking - as for example in "The Reference Library" written for the opening of the sixth-form library at Ysgol Gyfun Rhydfelen and published in Parables and Faxes: "But compared to you, an encyclopaedia/is thin provision. Throw the big tomes out,/and the almanacs with their logorrhoea./Read first the lexicons of your own doubt." Not only is that last line a moving summary of what education is about, but it generously shares the experience of uncertainty as instrumental to all forms of knowing. By refusing to talk down to us, however, Lewis demands considerable effort and some readers inevitably find the extent of that effort something of a strain. Certainly no one could say she is an easy read, but the challenge her poetry presents is one of a mind intrigued, intent on charting seemingly unfathomable waters; she is a poet who attempts to clarify but not simplify…

One might expect a detective story to come out with a definite ending - a revelation of "who dunnit" at the very least - but in her narrative sequence, "Y Llofrudd Iaith", Gwyneth Lewis appropriates the detective genre only to demonstrate again her reluctance to solve any problem once and for all. The sequence charts the apparent murder of the Welsh language personified as a mother whose daughters - a bard and an archivist - represent opposite ends of the feminine spectrum. Where the bard constantly tests the limits of respectable behaviour, indulging for instance in erotic as well as linguistic forays out of Welsh-speaking Wales, the archivist is lauded as a "good daughter" who tends her mother well, defends tradition and lists her mother's idioms in a sterile act of homage. This most recent volume takes its title from the Welsh word for murder, "llofruddiaeth" which is cunningly transformed into "the murder (of) language". That defamiliarising play on language is itself characteristic of Lewis's style and the multiplicity of the title's meanings should alert us to the fact that this detective story in poetic form is neither an easy tract on the death of Welsh nor an exposé of a single assassin who has finally killed the language. Instead, the sequence is a series of testimonies, letters, conversations and meditations by all those involved at the scene of the crime. Our detective is Carma, a man blessed with a dual perspective, partly as a result of his family and cultural background - his mother is from Colwyn Bay, his father from Japan. In this respect, Lewis conforms to one of the genre's long-standing conventions, namely the existence of a detective who is an insider-outsider, able to interpret the unspoken moods of a community but also to see it from a critical distance. Such implicit detachment sits well with this poet's own self-positioning…