Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful Collection
Review: This collection showcases Thomas' best work. I am always amazed by how few people know nothing by Thomas but "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" If you are interested in fabulous poetry filled with mystery and beauty this is a wonderful book to start with.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Collection
Review: This collection showcases Thomas' best work. I am always amazed by how few people know nothing by Thomas but "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" If you are interested in fabulous poetry filled with mystery and beauty this is a wonderful book to start with.
Rating: 
Summary: The fire of birds in the world's turning wood
Review: This reader has had the first 52 lines of Dylan Thomas's "Author's Prologue" memorized since the age of sixteen, and has a semi-firm grasp of the remaining 50 lines of the poem. In the absence of unforgettably solemn liturgies or a culture immersed in scriptural cadences, Thomas's poems fulfilled for this reader the same function than the Authorized Version of the Holy Bible fulfilled for many previous generations of English-speaking poets: making us fall in love with the sound of the word.Thomas is not always clear and comely, rarely dulcet and decorous, raucous oftener than reverent (he sometimes manages to be both!), but he is never hackneyed and almost impossible to forget. Some of the effects in "Poem On His Birthday" and "Over Sir John's Hill" are as lovely and intricate as anything by Gerard Manley Hopkins, e g: "this sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave" or "flash, and the plumes crack, and a black cap of jackdaws Sir John's just hill dons." In the earliest eighteen poems, we have a kind of 20th-century retelling of the Book of Genesis (there is a poem called "In the Beginning"), with William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience and perhaps Auden, Lawrence, and Freud as tributary influences. The later lyrics of nostalgia, "Fern Hill" and "Poem in October," exert an undeniable charm, and the wartime elegies ("A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London" most notably) have a furious splendour. The villanelle, for better or for worse, is immortal. The flaws in Dylan Thomas's aesthetic are somewhat obvious -- making the sound of the language into a kind of religion is not the most prudent course. And the failures, when they occur ("Once Below a Time") are crashingly abysmal. But we retain our familial loyalty to Dylan Thomas, who sang to the best of his love as the flood began, the moonshine-drinking Noah of the bay who sings still in these ineffaceable poems, around the globe from Laugharne to Lesotho, from Swansea to Sandusky -- wherever his books are found, opened, and cherished.
Rating:
Summary: God, is it that time already?
Review: When God called last orders on Dylan Thomas he wasn't joking, and probably did us out of some more of the great insight into the mystical, marvellous and mundane world of life and living and death. Dylan is welsher than welsh and more universal than universal studios. He has been scorned by the weak bladdered and berated by the stong breathed. However, and thanks to a strong following in the USA, Dylan Thomas hasn't been consigned to the literary dustbin for fringe colonial artists but elevated to greatness through a force far greater than some Fleet street snobbery. Dylan Thomas has been the greatest poet in the english language in the 20th century, and here is the evidence, the proof, the collateral. God love em too! regards, martyn_jones@iniciativas.com
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