Mercer Simpson

Mercer Frederick Hampson Simpson, teacher and poet: born London 27 January 1926; married 1961 Betty Cook (one daughter); died Cardiff 11 June 2007.

Mercer Simpson felt a close affinity with Wales and the literary affairs of the country where he lived for more than 50 years. He was so often identified with Welsh writing in English that his verse appeared in all the major anthologies and the writers he chose to write about were from the whole canon, from Henry Vaughan to Glyn Jones. Even so, it was the scenes of his childhood and early manhood in Suffolk that inspired him most.

His first collection, East Anglian Wordscapes (1993), is a sequence of 20 poems celebrating places in that "flat country" between Cambridge, King's Lynn, Great Yarmouth and Ipswich. The book's epigraph comes from an essay by Jeremy Hooker, another English poet living in Wales who is much taken with the sense of place: "Some people who no longer live in a particular place still carry it inside them, and speak from or through it even when they are not speaking about it."

Mercer Simpson was born in Fulham, London in 1926, the only child of a consultant neurologist, but was sent by elderly parents to King Edward VI School in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, in whose Old Boys' journal some of his poems were later reprinted. At the age of 18, before the end of the Second World War, he enlisted with the Royal Marines and was identified as officer material, only to find military discipline intolerable: it was a merciful release when he was sent on a Royal Navy short course at Magdalene College, Cambridge. After demobilisation he returned to Magdalene to finish a degree in English and the course of his career was thenceforth set.

After training to be a teacher at Bristol University, he moved to Wales in 1950 on taking up a post as Senior English Master at Monkton School in Cardiff. Many pupils were enthralled by his reciting poetry in the classroom, for he had a stentorian voice inherited, he thought, from his grandfather, also named Mercer Simpson, who had managed the Theatre Royal in Birmingham.

In 1967 he joined the staff of the Glamorgan College of Technology in Trefforest, near Pontypridd, which later grew into a Polytechnic and is now the University of Glamorgan. There he taught Liberal Studies, mainly to students of Engineering among whom this most courteous of men was popular because he was also a canal and railway enthusiast. He was later promoted to Senior Lecturer in English in the Department of Arts and Language. In 1974 he took a sabbatical and was duly awarded an MA from the University of Wales for a thesis on aspects of the English novel in the 20th century.

Simpson threw himself into Welsh literary life with gusto. A late-flowering poet, he published two more collections of his verse: Rain from a Clear Blue Sky (1994) and Early Departures, Late Arrivals (2006); a third, Enclosures and Disclosures is to be published this month. Although all three books contain poems inspired by places and people in Wales, it was to East Anglia that he most often returned in his imagination.

What interested him was life's quiddities, often originating in childhood, usually presented in the context of the natural world and always set in a particular landscape. Many ask questions about the numinous and all may be seen as belonging to the English pastoral tradition.

It was the Welsh Academy, the national association of writers in Wales, which gave Simpson opportunities to make a contribution to the literary life of his adopted country. He served on its committees, edited its news bulletin for five years, read scores of manuscripts, and made himself available to younger writers seeking advice. Equally important work was done for The Anglo-Welsh Review, Poetry Wales and The New Welsh Review.

But his finest piece of criticism appeared as an introduction to the Collected Poems of Glyn Jones in 1996. Here was the mature critic, lucid and stringent but intent on demonstrating how the long poem "Seven Keys to Shaderdom" is one of the major achievements of Welsh poetry in English. Simpson also contributed most of the entries on Welsh topics in The Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature (1989).

Meic Stephens