Despite it being one of the most enduring quirks of life on planet Earth, stories that successfully grapple with nature’s rawness or brutality are rare. Perhaps the vast scale of nature is why: how do you translate its power? Perhaps by writing stories centred on the critical labour period of a cow, being caught on a boat in the swell of the sea, or a storm that has turned a farm into an electrical minefield, for instance? It takes utter confidence. And in his latest short story collection, Cynan Jones has done all of this – weaving in themes of grief, superstition, the internal vs the external, and the symbiosis of life and death as he goes.

In Pulse Jones’ ambition can be seen to continue the arduous journey forward, progressing and refining elements and intentions found in previous works such as The Dig and ‘The Edge of the Shoal’. The latter was his first work published in The New Yorker, back in 2016. ‘Pulse’, the final story and namesake of this collection, was his second.

Jones’ style is well-known to those who have read his work. While their chosen subjects take very different walks in life,  you can look at Anthony Shapland’s work and note a sort of lineage forming in real time. Both, incidentally, are published by Granta. They have sparse, highly poetic and emotive prose that reads almost like theatrical performance.

Jones is the genesis of this style. In this collection he is at his most refined to date; you can feel the cadence and delivery, the tension, how each word has been painstakingly considered – but it’s subtle, never distracting, and never reads as though forced. In fact, as with many great prosaists, it is so distinctive and hypnotic that occasional moments where it falters feel almost jarring. This very rarely happens; where it does more commonly is within the dialogue which is by no means bad, but can lack the same poetic magic of the prose at times, pulling you out of rhythm slightly.

Throughout Pulse, we are shown specific moments in life where incidental action has an existential consequence within the interior monologues we gain access to. The rock of a boat causing a man to regret many of his life’s actions, as in the sublime opener ‘Peregrine’, is just one example. These shifts from micro to macro come at startling frequency, almost on a paragraph-by-paragraph (though ‘stanza’ feels just as apt when describing this work) basis.

These shifts occur across stories, too. As a collection, the breadth of human emotion is vast, but a central message emanates around these questions of how individuals react to the world around them – how they find current, live meaning in things as timeless as nature, as unexplainable as luck. We can see it in the opening story. ‘The boy being there. It doesn’t mean anything. The way the one gull had purposelessly tumbled. It’s the chill. It’s just the chill getting to you.’

Even if you don’t want to, it becomes quite difficult not to think of stories like ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ when you read Jones – this is more evident in ‘Reindeer’ than ‘Peregrine’, despite the latter taking place on water. To read someone who comes from the same place I call home, and who is held in the highest regard on the world stage, is rare; someone who is able to craft moods, moments, stories that genuinely feel ‘up there’ with Hemingway and McCarthy for their uncompromising brutality feels precious and almost unbelievable. Life-affirming in ways. I am not one for hyperbole, so I say this in spite of my instincts. Often these stories, particularly ‘Peregrine’ and ‘Stock’, show that Jones has pass to roam the same corridors as these figures.

‘Pulse’ shares a similar innate feeling to Kevin Barry’s ‘Fjord of Killary’which was also published in The New Yorker. It conveys a small domestic situation where a sense of dread slowly rises, a creeping flood, the electrical charge on the land; a life-changing moment that is about to happen.

If Kevin Barry is a prose writer who pays homage to Ireland’s historical abundance of great playwriting, Cynan Jones is a prose writer who pays homage to Wales’ own great form: poetry. There’s plenty that is different between these writers, but their sense of appreciation for literary formats which they technically don’t write in (but absolutely do) is similar. Both are revered, and both are in dialogue with forms less typically mainstream for contemporary readers. It is significant, as these are the questions writers should be asking; these are the contributions that legacy should consist of.

Of course, you have to be incredibly good to begin to do this, and Jones has more than earned his place. Pulse is another confident step on Jones’ journey as one of the living greats of Welsh literature – and of English language literature as a whole.

Welsh writers are under-represented for many reasons. That is a different conversation for a different time. Ultimately, the point here is that Jones is a Welsh writer of immense originality; one we should be grateful to exist at the same time as. One with rare magnitude, and one whose craft keeps pushing further down the remarkable path it is on.

Pulse by Cynan Jones is available now from Granta Books.