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Diary

Ian Hamilton: Poets Laureate, 7 January 1999

... He was of course a fierce opponent of biography. I remember a review he wrote of a biography of Dylan Thomas: who else, I wondered, could write about Thomas and scarcely mention drink and money? You had to admire it in a way but it was also pretty annoying: who do these incantators think they are? But then Hughes did ...

Mysteries of Kings Cross

Iain Sinclair, 5 October 1995

Vale Royal 
by Aidan Dun.
Goldmark, 130 pp., £22.50, July 1995
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... Spenser and Shakespeare and Donne, through Milton and Blake and Keats, to David Jones, Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas, Nicholas Moore, to Lee Harwood’s Cable Street, Bill Griffiths’s Whitechapel and Brian Catling’s The Stumbling Block. London infected its interpreters, soliciting contributions to an open-ended project. The names of the poets were the ...

Diary

Andrew O’Hagan: Orders of Service, 18 April 2019

... order of service is a scream,’ I said. ‘A reading from The West Highland Railway by John Thomas?’ ‘Well, there you are.’ ‘Also a reading from The Liverpool Repertory Theatre, 1911-34. Followed by a bit of Macaulay’s “The Passing of the Second Reading of the Reform Bill”, read by Lord Mayhew. Address by Alasdair Milne, Director ...

Quality Distinctions

Edmund Leach, 17 December 1981

The Architecture of Experience: A Discussion of the Role of Language and Literature in the Construction of the World 
by G.D. Martin.
Edinburgh, 201 pp., £12, February 1981, 0 333 23560 6
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... have almost the whole of value-culture from Bach to Britten, from Bosch to Picasso, from Donne to Dylan Thomas, consigned to the dustbin’. Apparently the continents of Asia, Africa and South America do not exist except as the homelands of superstition and benighted savagery. Value-culture is the mark of ‘our’ superiority, and it is ludicrous to ...

On Rosemary Tonks

Patrick McGuinness: Rosemary Tonks, 2 July 2015

... own turn towards spiritualism. The poem echoes, to different and clearly parodic effect, the Dylan Thomas of ‘Fern Hill’: ‘In the green rags of the Bible I tore up/The straight silk of childhood on my head.’ It is, for Tonks, unusually dense and incrusted with the Dylanesque verbal impasto of the 1940s poets, the ‘new romantics’ she ...

Colloquially Speaking

Patrick McGuinness: Poetry from Britain and Ireland after 1945, 1 April 1999

The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 
edited by Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford.
Viking, 480 pp., £10.99, September 1998, 0 670 86829 9
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The Firebox: Poetry from Britain and Ireland after 1945 
edited by Sean O’Brien.
Picador, 534 pp., £16.99, October 1998, 0 330 36918 0
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... were on the margin, is far from being a stranger to mainstream anthologies, while Basil Bunting, Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, R.S. Thomas, Iain Crichton Smith, Thom Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig are unassailably part of our consciousness of the poetic landscape. Auden and MacNeice, too, though the omission ...

He wants me no more

Tessa Hadley: Pamela Hansford Johnson, 21 January 2016

Pamela Hansford Johnson: Her Life, Works and Times 
by Wendy Pollard.
Shepheard-Walwyn, 500 pp., £25, October 2014, 978 0 85683 298 7
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... had been engaged two or three times by the time she was twenty). She wrote to the 18-year-old Dylan Thomas in Swansea when he in turn won a prize in the Referee’s ‘Poet’s Corner’ and soon they were sending each other passionate worked-up letters. Thomas pretended that he was 21; when he first came to visit ...

Social Arrangements

John Bayley, 30 December 1982

The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry 
edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion.
Penguin, 208 pp., £1.95, October 1982, 0 14 042283 8
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The Rattle Bag 
edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.
Faber, 498 pp., £10, October 1982, 0 571 11966 2
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... by ‘negative feedback’: Auden brings back forms and metres ‘in chic contemporary guise’; Dylan Thomas causes ‘a blockage against intelligence’; even ‘the Movement’ itself – the incisively intelligent ‘academic-administrative’ verses of Larkin, Wain and Enright – could not help endorsing the most negative feedback of all ...

Rise and Fall of Radio Features

Marilyn Butler, 7 August 1980

Louis MacNeice in the BBC 
by Barbara Coulton.
Faber, 215 pp., £12.50, May 1980, 0 571 11537 3
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Best Radio Plays of 1979 
Eyre Methuen/BBC, 192 pp., £6.95, June 1980, 0 413 47130 6Show More
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... revolved around certain pubs in Soho, Fitzrovia or the immediate environs of Broadcasting House. Dylan Thomas was much in use as an actor and a voice as well as a writer. A guest list for a Features party planned in 1951 included Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Laurie Lee and ...

Olallieberries

Stephanie Burt: D.A. Powell’s poems, 24 September 2009

Chronic: Poems 
by D.A. Powell.
Graywolf, 79 pp., $20, February 2009, 978 1 55597 516 6
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... resembles – in his sometime melodrama, his lush wordscapes, his focus on eros and elegy – is Dylan Thomas. Powell has (as Thomas did not) a love for rough edges, an attention (sometimes unwilling) to popular culture and an ear for other people’s speech: but he has, too, ...

That Wild Mercury Sound

Charles Nicholl: Dylan’s Decade, 1 December 2016

The Bootleg Series, Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965-66 
by Bob Dylan.
Columbia, £60, November 2015
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... Bob Dylan’s​ first album, recorded in New York in late 1961, was simply called Bob Dylan. The creation of ‘Bob Dylan’ – the persona, the sound, the look – was as important as the record’s contents. He’d been using the alias since the summer of 1960 ...

Puck’s Dream

Mark Ford, 14 June 1990

Selected Poems 1990 
by D.J. Enright.
Oxford, 176 pp., £6.95, March 1990, 0 19 282625 5
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Life by Other Means: Essays on D.J. Enright 
edited by Jacqueline Simms.
Oxford, 208 pp., £25, March 1990, 0 19 212989 9
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Vanishing Lung Syndrome 
by Miroslav Holub, translated by David Young and Dana Habova.
Faber, 68 pp., £10.99, April 1990, 0 571 14378 4
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The Dimension of the Present Moment, and Other Essays 
by Miroslav Holub, edited by David Young.
Faber, 146 pp., £4.99, April 1990, 0 571 14338 5
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Poems Before and After: Collected English Translations 
by Miroslav Holub, translated by Ewald Osers and George Theiner.
Bloodaxe, 272 pp., £16, April 1990, 1 85224 121 7
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My Country: Collected Poems 
by Alistair Elliot.
Carcanet, 175 pp., £18.95, November 1989, 0 85635 846 0
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1953: A Version of Racine’s ‘Andromaque’ 
by Craig Raine.
Faber, 89 pp., £4.99, March 1990, 0 571 14312 1
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Andromache 
by Jean Racine, translated by Douglas Dunn.
Faber, 81 pp., £4.99, March 1990, 0 571 14249 4
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... In ‘Saying no’ (1960), for instance, Enright elevates his rejection of the flamboyance of Dylan Thomas and the Apocalyptics into a moral injunction: Epochs of parakeets, of peacocks, of paradisiac birds – Then one bald owl croaked, No. Such table-thumping seems a bit dated now – one is inadvertently reminded of television’s ‘Just Say ...

What a carry-on

Seamus Perry: W.S. Graham, 18 July 2019

W.S. Graham: New Selected Poems 
edited by Matthew Francis.
Faber, 144 pp., £12.99, September 2018, 978 0 571 34844 2
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W.S. Graham 
edited by Michael Hofmann.
NYRB, 152 pp., £9.99, October 2018, 978 1 68137 276 1
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... identified in Graham’s voice as ‘a strange hostility towards the reader’. The influence of Dylan Thomas has often been noticed, and the effect of the densely packed verbalism is, as in Thomas, principally to imply the labour that has gone into making the poem. You certainly couldn’t get further from the ...

Modern Wales

Rosalind Mitchison, 19 November 1981

Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880-1980 
by Kenneth O. Morgan.
Oxford, 463 pp., £15, March 1981, 0 19 821736 6
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... writer ought to be his language,’ and repeats the attack by Bobi Jones, a learner of Welsh, on Dylan Thomas for ‘importing and adapting culture from an uninteresting and impoverished England’. In both statements Welsh-speakers are not only claiming what is certainly their right and privilege, to prefer one culture to another: they are also seeking ...

On Anthony Hecht

William Logan, 21 March 2024

... reviewers seemed to resist were not Hecht’s Audenesque tendencies, but the further influence of Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane, who could not write without overwriting.Born in 1923 in New York City, Hecht had a privileged but disrupted childhood. His father worked at a fake job paid for by his father-in-law. The boy attended private schools, rarely ...

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