Today marks a very special birthday – DYLAN THOMAS was born on the 27th October 1914 – 108 years ago. To closely coincide with this date, Welsh poet and dramatist ROGER STENNETT has published a new collection, Forty Poems for Dylan Thomas.
The collection explores Thomas’s dazzling work, as well as his complicated life and legacy, serving as both a tribute and a singular form of biography. Uniquely within poetry, it is an entire collection dedicated to another poet who was not personally known to the author.
Much has been written about Wales’ greatest literary son. Memoir, biography, documentary, even feature film has attempted to capture the truth of this paradoxical figure.
Dylan was born in the front bedroom of number 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in Swansea and spent his first 20 years living at the house. It was here that he wrote a large proportion of the poems that would make up his first three published collections, recording them in a series of notebooks.
Dylan took lodgings in London in November 1934 but returned frequently to the family home until 1937 when his parents moved to a smaller house at Bishopston. The house was finally sold in 1943. By the 1990s the house was languishing as a student bedsit before being painstakingly restored by Geoff and Annie Haden to replicate how it would have looked during Dylan’s time at the house. Dylan’s tiny bedroom has been carefully re-created from descriptions and clues in his letters and writings. The house is open for tours, stays and as an events venue.
Starry-eyed visionary, booze-bloated lush; unabashed romantic, serial adulterer… And that’s before we even get to the poetry. Poems such Do Not Go Gentle, and And Death Shall Have No Dominion have entered the popular imagination. Meanwhile, many of his other works continue to confound critics to this day.
But if there’s one thing we can all agree upon: Dylan Thomas casts as long shadow. And it is this that Roger explores in his collection.
As Roger told us……
“To write the collection, I drew upon my friendship with Aeronwy Thomas, Dylan’s daughter, as well as my lifetime of engagement with Dylan’s verse. Throughout my life, Thomas’s work has both inspired and intimidated me. Like so many others, my first encounter with his work, as a child, set me on the path to becoming a writer. His influence upon literature, particularly within Wales, is indelible.”
Roger has spent much of his writing career in the theatre, working for the likes of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Bristol Old Vic, as well as Danger Mouse, Sooty and Avenger Penguins. Indeed, he hadn’t published a poetry collection since the 1970s. But when it came to capturing the paradoxical figure of his literary idol, he felt it fitting to Thomas’s chosen form.
“I had been nursing the idea of writing about Dylan for years. And then lockdown came, and with it a single new poem. The return to my first writing love kept me going through the darkest of times.”
The collection starts when Dylan was fourteen years old and moves through the stages of his life and work until the inevitable curtain fall. It is poignant, yet honest, lofty but rooted. In the words of Geoff Haden, custodian of Dylan Birthplace Museum, and chairman of the Dylan Thomas society……
“It is a fitting tribute to its subject, and there is no higher praise than Thomas’s that.”
Perhaps most poignant of all, given the time of year, is ‘Under an Old Welsh Sky’, a poem celebrating Thomas’s birthday. It imagines a meeting between the author and the spirit of Thomas, on the day itself.
Dylan surveys a sodden, grey Welsh autumnal day, and mourns both his own passing and of all those he loved.
“No dens to make in faraway Cwmdonkin / No jelly, cake or bright red balloons today.”
But as the imagined Stennett reassures, although the landscape may seem sombre, the very fabric of the country itself is indelibly interwoven with Thomas’s words, such is their enduring popularity. ”Perhaps the boy done good after all…”
Forty Poems for Dylan Thomas is currently available from HERE