Dylan Thomas' Wales

by Hilary Laurie

Dylan Thomas returned time and again in his verse to Wales, particularly the area around Laugharne, which gave rise to his most famous verse play, Under Milk Wood. Come to know the Welsh towns and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0297824813
• ISBN13: 9780297824817
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Cassell
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.7" x 10.0"

Customer Reviews

And the knock of sailing boats on the net-webbed wall

Hilary Laurie's pictorial biography is a worthy successor to John Ackerman's "Welsh Dylan", a book we first encountered in the middle 1980s. Laurie's book, "Dylan Thomas's Wales," combines colour photographs of modern-day Wales with old black-and-whites of Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, Dylan's parents and children; the text is an accurate chronicle of the poet's life, from schoolboy mischief to the turbulence of his more famous years. Laurie's tone toward her subject is one of deep respect, with a keen eye to Thomas's faults (usually described by Thomas himself, in the letters which Laurie excerpts).There is, as there must be, a generous sampling of some of Dylan Thomas's more famous poems, the lines that echo in the brain and heart for twenty decades after you've read them. Occasionally, the texts of the poems are almost undetectably inaccurate, a plural noun made singular or a definite article omitted, but these objections aside, Laurie has done a fantastic job in making the life of Dylan Thomas quite vivid, and in giving American readers a fairly good visual impression of the landscape in which Thomas was immersed.A photograph from "Welsh Dylan" (Ackerman's book) that might have been included is that of the club-wielding chalk giant, etched into the hill of Cerne Abbas, a landmark that inspired Dylan Thomas's poem "In the White Giant's Thigh." But that photograph of a youthful Mrs Thomas clutching the hay to conceal her birthdaysuitedness (p 79) might be, for some, apt compensation.

Exquisite photos, poems, letters in one gorgeous volume

I have never been able to see the exact places that Dylan Thomas wrote about, so this book was very meaningful to me. I didn't expect to see Caitlin Thomas in a field dressed only in hay, but she's here, too. Especially touching is a photo of Dylan with Pamela Hansford Johnson. They look happy, but the caption reads: "This visit convinced her of the hopelessness of their relationship."The text is part biography, part letters, part poems. Photos of places he lived, walked, played. Probably over a hundred photos in the book, most of which this Dylan Thomas addict had never seen.