The Lampeter Review - Issue 10

tlr The Lampeter Review

ISSN 2054-8257 (Print) / ISSN 2054-8265 (Online) JOURNAL of the Lampeter Creative Writing Centre www.lampeter-review.com

issue 10/ October 2014

Emma Baines Mark Blayney Helen Philippa East Dic Edwards Menna Elfyn Paul Geraghty John Goodby Philip Gross Jackie Hayden Suzanne Iuppa Mike Jenkins Tony Kendrew Guy Manning Jo Mazelis Kate Murray Kevin O’Neill Rachel Simons Katherine Stansfield Grant Tarbard Jacqui Thewless David Urwin Martin Willitts Eloise Williams

THE LAMPETER REVIEW The online magazine of the Lampeter Creative Writing Centre www.lampeter-review.com | info@lampeter-review.com

Managing Editor: Dic Edwards ISSUE Editor: Ros Hudis Associate Editors: Carly Holmes, Tony Kendrew, John Lavin Design: Constantinos Andronis (info@spectrum-design.gr) Cover Page Image: Dylan Thomas by Kate Murray / Bob Dylan by Kevin O’ Neill / Chelsea Hotel image found on http://digitizedgraffiti.com/2011/08/21/the-end-of-an-era-chelsea-hotel-closes-its-doors/ Š Respective authors. All rights reserved. None of the material published here may be used elsewhere without the written permission of the author. You may print one copy of any material on this website for your own personal, non-commercial use.

CREATIVE WRITING UNDERGRADUATE COURSES AT TSD Based on the Lampeter Campus, the Creative Writing BAs build on a fifteen year tradition of teaching Creative Writing at this location. The courses offer modules in all the creative genres and are underpinned by an element of English Literature.

MA CREATIVE WRITING & MA CREATIVE & SCRIPT WRITING The Creative Writing Degree offers two pathways - one with scriptwriting, one without.

It can be taken as a one year taught course with a further writing-up year, or part-time over four years. Modules are offered in all creative genres.

BA and MA courses are taught by a staff of prominent, internationally renowned writers and lecturers, including poets Menna Elfyn and Samantha Wynne-Rydderch, poet and playwright Dic Edwards and poet, author and critic, Jeni Williams.

PhD IN CREATIVE WRITING Trinity St David’s Creative Writing PhD has built up a reputation as one of Wales’ most successful doctoral programmes. The course supervisors are all published creative writers with expertise in most areas of prose, poetry, fiction, children’s fiction, narrative nonfiction and script writing.

The PhD in Creative Writing combines a proposed manuscript (fiction, poems or playscript) with an element of supporting or contextualising research. The proposed manuscript will be volume length (the natural length of a book, whether poetry or story collection, novel, or playscript). The supporting research will be roughly 25% of the 100,000 word submission.

Applications to: d.edwards@tsd.uwtsd.ac.uk

Table of Contents

-7Editorial / Ros hudis -10Bequest / Jacqui Thewless -11In county Derry: ‘Masters of War’ / Mike Jenkins -13Atlantic Exchange / Jo Mazelis -17For Dylan’s Centenary / Rachel Simons -19Girl of Gogledd / Suzanne Iuppa -21Dylan, Dylan and Me / Jackie Hayden -28Teaching Dylan Thomas’s muse to speak Welsh / Menna Elfyn -30Dysgu Cymraeg I Awen Dylan Thomas/ Menna Elfyn

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-32Images of Laugharne / Guy Manning -36Sobre el Bosc Lacti - an extract / Dic Edwards -53Over Milk Wood / Dic Edwards -63Three Versions out of Dylan Thomas / Philip Gross -69Green And Dying / Eloise Williams -70Maes y Bryn / Emma Baines -72An Annotation of Fern Hill / John Goodby -76The Murder of Dylan Thomas / Mark Blayney -87Three Villanelles / Grant Tarbard -91Postcards of the Hanging / Helen Philippa East -95Childhoods / David Urwin -97Three Poems / Martin Willitts -101States / Tony Kendrew

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-106Missed you at Cwmdonkin Drive / Katherine Stansfield -108Contributors

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Editorial

This, the tenth issue of TLR, is devoted primarily to Dylan Thomas, in unison with the UWTSD celebrations of his centenary year. As a sub-thread, we also include a selection of material responding to Bob Dylan – a currently popular coupling of iconic figures that has enlivened the debate about sources and influence and the relevance of perceived points of cultural intersection and affinity. A number of academics and writers have recently explored and lectured on such interconnections, amongst them Jackie Hayden, author of A Map of Love – Around Wales with Dylan Thomas. We are pleased to publish an exclusive interview about his touring lecture Dylan, Dylan and Me. Early on in his interview, Hayden makes the point that a link with one artist can make another artist more accessible – and it is this transference, of seeing one thing through the lens of another, both culturally and in terms of a personal perspective, that provides a keynote to the issue. Philip Gross offers poems that arose from a Dylan Thomas ‘translation day’ where those attending followed a brief to translate DT into a variety of languages and Gross’s own task was to re-render him in English! As he points out, Dylan’s own poetic ‘invites it, surely?

From the start, his poems are chopping and splicing their references, putting strain on clichés and folk sayings to see what associations they release..’ - a technique, one might argue, that is also characteristic of Bob Dylan.

Similarly, Grant Tarbard, in a peculiarly post-modern style of homage, transposes the language and ambience of three of DT’s Ministry of Information film scripts into a form DT himself made famous - the sonorous villanelle, while Menna Elfyn and Dic Edwards both provide literal acts of translation – Elfyn’s Welsh poem is accompanied by an English translation, Edwards’ extract from his play Over Milk Wood, is partnered by an extract from its translation into Catalan, an effect of evocative displacement we felt was heightened by reproducing the pages of the Catalan book photographically. But these pieces also

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deal, playfully, with the often vexed discourse around DT’s fit to Welsh cultural identity – his transposition to National Icon.

John Goodby, a leading scholar and poet, at the forefront of current reappraisals of DT, has provided an annotation of Fern Hill which distills the most acute contemporary readings of the poet. Goodby is amongst those who argue that evaluation of the poet’s work has been clouded by the historic tendency to filter reading of his poetry through the lens of his biography. We publish two stories that subtly unpick the dominance of the popular biographical narrative: Mark Blayney’s remarkable The Murder of Dylan Thomas and Jo Mazelis’ poetically structured Atlantic Exchange. In more iconoclastic mode is our regular opinion piece by our North Californian based editor, Tony Kendrew, who gives a forthright and personal appraisal of the Dylan/Dylan connection.

In the same vein, most of the submissions published in this issue are self-aware in their acknowledgment of the way response is modulated by personal history and the weight of familiarity or literary/popular perceptions. Most convey tribute to what is glorious in DT’s writing, yet resort to strategies of irony and mild parody, often building on a scaffold of Thomas’s own linguistic tropes and subverted pastoral. However, they are also pieces that go beyond textual self-consciousness to evoke convincing worlds in language that is vibrant or unsettling and in a voice which, even when it employs the mask of ventriloquism, is distinctive and clearly its author’s own. Equally, they are insightful about their sources, show evidence of research beyond the well-known ‘facts,’ are skillfully crafted, and have a strong emotional engine. In other words, they use their sources creatively and to reach beyond parody or burlesque. Such creativity is evident in two poems

by Martin Willitts, inspired by a visit to DT’s writing shed in Laugharne. Willitts was the winner of UWTSD’s inaugural Dylan Thomas International Poetry Competition. We are delighted to also publish his winning poem, Daffodils.

Of the submissions responding to Bob Dylan, Helen Philippa East’s assured story Postcards of the Hanging stood out for the same reasons, suggesting that here was a writer to watch.

We also feature images of paintings of Laugharne by the Pembrokeshire artist, Guy Manning. These, with their simultaneous evocation of place and displacement, seemed to visually reinforce the keynote of the issue. And indeed tangible rendering of place, as well as displacement, is a striking element of most of the contributions, be it Laugharne, Swansea or New York. Perceptions of Dylan Thomas, in particular, are linked to the places he frequented or about [8]

which he wrote. His landscapes and townscapes have become part of the way we ‘possess’ him – as writer, as icon, in the same way that we ‘possess’ Bob Dylan in relationship to the topographies of his lyrics. Such anchoring is powerful.

It creates a sense of identification that is then strengthened by our personal memories of how two great artists have affected us at different times in our lives.

Yet perhaps, in the end, such figures will always elude our attempts to know them wholly – through biography or place or critique. They will escape the colourations of our attitude towards them, our need to deify or identify, or to uncloud the distorting mirror of history. They will always be, in some sense,’out,’ as Katherine Stansfield explores in her beautifully pitched and witty poem that concludes the issue. Nevertheless, the effort to ‘find’ them can be creative. A rich creativity and exploration is certainly true of the pieces we offer in this issue. As Stansfield writes: … but still we could sing of waiting and thinking and the words that come in the night and the morning and today, Dylan – these words, this song. I came to nose about, poke about, turn about in your house and your life and I found this today, Dylan, while you were out.

Ros Hudis, Editor

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Bequest (from Bain of Crathie and Dylan Thomas) Jacqui Thewless

What were they for me, those two huge wizards of my childhood with their essences of blue wood-smoke, peat’s reek mixed with the rough flock’s grease and their spells of speech?

Why do the years go leaving us with questions like this?

Before these smooth, ubiquitous coffee grounds made me a zombie sitting by a screen, there were once flecks of grit in water supped from hand-cups to spit from a river in a glen. I thirst in a town in Wales, remembering sheep scattering for a dog and a shepherd’s springing bootsteps on the resinous heather.

I have cooled with age. But under the grace, I mind the slow relief of fire in the stone-walled place of my own heart’s hearth: it comes to me how elfin eyes told tales with one keen eyebrow raised, and how a mouth that was married to a fag gave me its cadences for safekeeping. Nobody else’s woollen hat was ancient as that.

Extraordinary light, under my own hat: old Rob. And the young dog, Dylan ’s dazzling.

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In County Derry: “Masters of War” Mike Jenkins

We were singing ‘Masters of War’ at the piano in the classroom the green-eyed Gaelic teacher with her waist-long hair and slim body a country I’d come to know much better singing together ‘Masters of War’ I stood behind her, voice rivering deep below the strata of the choir, at home now in the harmonies in a strange land of pointed barrels which had met me from the plane where my mind recalled ‘Masters of War’ when the Deputy Head burst in and spotted two pupils giggling, he quaked and cracked with anger punishing every one of them; pain made their voices louder

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sensing the meaning of ‘Masters of War’ at the window an army helicopter before it landed near the estate, squaddies with machine-guns ready to fire, to lift suspects and drag them away; houses where the tricolor was raised none heard us singing ‘Masters of War’ and as long as that song lasted we were marching, fists held high like those of Burntollet and Derry City who had stood against batons and bullets, pounding riot shields with music and rhyme the power of ‘Masters of War’.

Note: - ‘Burntollet’ and ‘Derry City’ – scenes of Civil Rights marches in the 60’s.

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Atlantic Exchange Jo Mazelis

Leaves were falling from the trees in Central Park, somersaulting through the mild breeze, their colours catching the light; gold, amber, bronze, verdigris, oxblood and copper. The man and his young companion sat next to one another on the long curving wooden bench where the sun, breaking through the trees, created a red-tinged spotlight. Without speaking, each produced a notebook and pen; hers from a leather handbag, his from a commodious pocket, bringing with it a small shower of loose tobacco.

Her hair, which had been platinum blonde that June, was now a more sober light brown. She had a scar beneath her right eye. He knew the story of that scar, as she knew the story of his broken arm, now healed.

Companionably, they each wrote a few words, paused, then added more words.

October, he wrote. Faun, she wrote, then, miracle.

Neither so much as glanced at the other’s handiwork, their spells would be shared as incantations. Druid words, bitch goddess curses. Magic in the cloistered air of New York’s green lung.

The leaves, so recently settled and resigned to damp decay upon the paths and grassy swathes, began to feel that old sensation of sap rising, a spring at the stem; life giving. Colour came back into the veined cheeks of the oak, the birch, the ginkgo, the elm. And hesitatingly, stuttering over the ground, blown by the wind, each one flew upwards to its original place on the mother tree.

Closing her eyes she shuffles in blind hands the Tarot pack, stops at one card, Death. The earth reverses its path imperceptibly and in doing so tilts its axis so that the sun appears higher in the sky. The shadows shrink from long shanks to more human dimensions.

A horse drawn carriage approaches at a leisurely pace; as it draws closer they can smell the hot horse scent of its flanks. The driver pulls at the reins and the animal comes to a lazy standstill. Rising from the bench she goes to the horse,

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and finding an apple in her hand, offers it flat-palmed to his warm lips and long yellow teeth. His eye is like a convex bronze mirror framed by the eyelashes of a courtesan.

A young French woman, who is pushing a baby in a stroller stops near the couple. A Rolleiflex hangs permanently around her neck and, as if she is adjusting a cumbersome piece of outlandish jewellery, she takes a shot of the disheveled man with the bulging eyes and his statuesque companion. She is momentarily deaf to the cries of the baby who is her charge. Hardly a soul sees her pictures; will not until she is forced to put them into storage. Will not until the dreadful day comes when she can no longer pay the storage fees and then everything she hoarded so carefully is auctioned off for a song. Why are you taking photos, Vivian? The question is impertinent; she stalks off angrily, shaking her head.

Time goes backward. No one notices as, aside from the subtly shifting seasons, their collective consciousness is stripped of their lived-through days and knowledge falls away. It is Friday, then Thursday, then Monday. October becomes September. September is once again August. The young woman who had swallowed fifty sleeping pills coughed them back up into her cupped hand, each tablet as dry and unsullied as when she had taken them. The swollen wound below her right eye had diminished, the insect never laid its seed pearl eggs, the gash was no longer a nursery for maggots.

The man finds himself descending the stairs that led up to the London bound plane backwards. June 3rd becomes June 2nd 1953. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Geoffrey Fisher, as if moving in a dream, inexplicably lifted the Imperial State Crown from young Queen Elizabeth’s head. As it weighed almost two and a half kilograms she felt as if she had been relieved of two large bags of Tate & Lyle sugar as well as the kingdom.

It is June 1st, then May 31st. Time stutters to a halt in its rewind and begins to move forward once again. The young woman waves goodbye to her mother and climbs the steps to the train.

Manhattan smoulders. Sylvia checks into the Barbizon, a hotel for ladies on the corner of Lexington and 63rd.

‘This,’ she said, turning a dazzling smile on her companion, Laurie, ‘is surely the start of the dream.’

Before Laurie had a chance to answer, a woman who neither had noticed before was bearing down on them. In a glance she seemed to dismiss Laurie and turned her fearsome gaze on Sylvia.

‘You,’ she said, catching her elbow, ‘You’re one of our guest editors aren’t you?’

Sylvia, flustered, attempted to offer her a white gloved hand, but this was ignored. [ 14 ]

‘Leave your luggage where it is. I have a job for you, come with me.’

Sylvia was dragged from the hotel and into the street where she was bundled into a chequered cab. A fistful of dollar bills was thrown into her lap.

‘Get to the Chelsea Hotel, get hold of that drunken Welsh poet and don’t let him out of your sight.’

Laurie had come to the entrance of the hotel and was staring at Sylvia in a stricken way as the cab drew away. Work at the offices of Mademoiselle wasn’t meant to start until 9am the next day, but this was New York, a career girl didn’t balk at challenges no matter how unexpected, she jumped. The words of Cyrilly Abels (for that was who the peremptory lady was) were writhing in a muddle in Sylvia’s head. She had to straighten them out. Rearrange them as she would the words of a poem. Drunken Welsh poet. Chelsea Hotel. Get hold of. Don’t let him out of your sight. There was only one Welsh poet she could think of, though she supposed there must be more. Only one she wanted to think of. Dylan Thomas.

But she wasn’t prepared. She wasn’t dressed to meet a poet. She was dressed for travel and her arrival at the Barbizon. She hadn’t researched the appropriate outfit, analyzed and fretted over it until she could wear it like armour.

‘Chelsea Hotel,’ the cab driver called in a New Jersey singsong, champing on the words.

She stepped out of the cab, hesitating for long enough on the sidewalk to get bumped, bruised and elbowed aside by the great tide of people. She looked up.

Red brick edifice, with iron embroidered balconies like strips of black lace on a crimson dress.

The lobby of the Chelsea was cooler and a degree quieter than the street.

Except for one voice. Disembodied. Bass and rich as bog peat. Then the voice drowns and smothers in a bronchial cough as if mud had filled his mouth. As if he was being buried alive.

Sylvia crossed the lobby aiming for the sound of the drowning man. She had in mind a fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast. She had in mind Ariadne – if she gave this man a secret thread he could find his way out of the labyrinth of New York.

Catching his breath he spied the young woman; her full mouth painted red, her long body, skin like parchment lit from within.

‘God has come home!’ he wanted to say. A line he’d written that very morning, the words in the mouth of a drunken, but lovable sot, home after a night carousing in the pub. He’d been thinking of himself and Caitlin when he wrote it, but she was less amused by his antics as the years went by.

‘Cyrilly Abels sent me,’ Sylvia said, once again proffering her gloved hand, but Dylan was looking past her, his face wearing a puzzled but delighted [ 15 ]

expression. Sylvia turned; just inside the entrance was a tousle-haired little girl with a snub nose and eyes bright as buttons.

‘Aeron?’ Dylan said and blinked. When he looked again the child was gone. Which was strange because, once or twice back in Laugharne, he’d failed to recognise his daughter when he passed her on Victoria Street and now here she was in Manhattan.

‘Mr Thomas, sir,’ Sylvia tried again. She wished her hero was much taller, more rugged, like Mr Rochester perhaps.

Time skipped a beat. It was as slippery as a wet bar of soap. Sylvia was in the offices of Mademoiselle eavesdropping on a very interesting conversation. Of course, with Dylan Thomas in town it is the best opportunity for a meeting, but... hmm? Yes, he was at The Hotel Chelsea.

She stood outside the Chelsea for hours, praying and hoping that the great man would emerge. She felt like a little girl waiting her father, but father it seemed would never return.

Note to the reader: During the summer of 1953 the poets Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath were both in New York City. She arrived on the 31st May and he left two or three days later. The photographer Vivian Maier was also in New York during this period.

Cyrilly Abels was the Managing Editor of Mademoiselle and Sylvia’s boss; she was keen at this time to secure publication rights for Dylan’s play for voices, Under Milk Wood. Dylan Thomas’ daughter Aeronwy has described how her father once or twice failed to recognize her in the street.

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For Dylan’s Centenary Rachel Simons

A bar, San Francisco.

I refuse to eat under the glass eye of the mounted buffalo head Told to “just bloody sit and -” A big man, red cap - “Do not go gentle into that good night,” Dad picks up the words, shoulders them like a pallbearer.

Waitresses loaded with sandwiches brush past and at the bar two strangers form a quiet knot of grief.

He falters on the last stanza, so dad drags the rage, rage up from his belly like an anchor, chest swelling like a wave.

His voice proves why he’s a hot-ticket for funerals.

The big guy is amazed that we really, really are from Swansea; my dad remembers the chained cup and my childhood windows open to the sweeping sea like a closed bracket drawn in haste.

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Back home mum lines us up on the slope of Cwmdonkin Drive, shuffles us until the blue plaque fits between our faces.

We develop the film at Boots, Uplands and send it off across the sea.

I am aflame with the knowledge that words, written, can sound so loud, so far.

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Girl of Gogledd Suzanne Iuppa

Can you take this letter

to the estuary line?

Where water birds

skim close to the three rivers Let them cry about

the hillfort girl To one man there

who was a true love of mine.

Tell him the past winter

was white, and cruel Say his boots

took me over the mountain Tell him the warm coat

that he wished just for me Hangs from the peg; lines my throat

like a jewel.

Tell him I dreamt he kissed

my hair, my breast

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Tell him he held me

while I was sleeping Don’t let him think

I’ve forgotten him, at all The wind keeps howling

his name, full best.

Are you travelling down

to the estuary line?

From the heather

and the lark-singing upland?

Remember me to one

who lives there He once was

the true love of mine.

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Dylan, Dylan and me Jackie Hayden

An exclusive interview for TLR by fellow Bob Dylan fan and writer, Paul Geraghty.

Paul Geraghty: You have delivered your Dylan, Dylan and Me lecture to diverse audiences. What are people asking you at these talks and why do you think there is such a healthy interest in what may seem to some a slightly obscure topic?

Jackie Hayden: No artist operates in a vacuum, and people are often fascinated by the creative links between different artists, especially across different disciplines. It not only helps break down superficial barriers but it can also make one artist more accessible through a link with another. Most of the people I’ve spoken to are Bob Dylan fans, and it seems his connection with Dylan Thomas validates his work as somehow connected with literature. Those who might otherwise be a little intimidated by the density of the poet’s work have admitted to finding it easier to approach him as I did. But in the end, the works of either have to resonate with the reader/listener to be worth engaging with. I’ve also met readers who, unlike myself, did not need the Bob connection in order to venture into Thomas’s work.

Bruce Springsteen said that the first time he heard Bob Dylan it felt like somebody kicked open the door to his mind. Music for him then became as cerebral and literary as it had been rhythmic and melodic. Can you remember hearing BD for the first time and how it made you feel?

Hearing Bob Dylan for the first time was as momentous as hearing my first recording of Dylan Thomas. From the very start I was struck by his audacity in opting to sing, play and write exactly as he wanted to, using styles that seemed utterly distinct from all others I’d heard. He had the courage to face down the

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folk police as well as the pop and rock cognoscenti. Right from the start he was challenging any consensus he stumbled upon, and still is, half a century later.

Earlier rock’n’roll heroes like Bill Haley and Elvis Presley provided rhythm and attitude. But while listeners might have been inspired by them to sing, play guitar or dance, they weren’t being intellectually challenged. Then came Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, so Springsteen reckoned that while “Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind”. How was the mind of a teenager from rural Ireland stimulated by the subject matter of Dylan’s songs and what views began to form as a result?

Before I heard Bob Dylan, I was a fan of the Beatles and most of the hip pop culture of the sixties. Then Dylan started to bring subjects to accessible popular music that totally opened my ears to serious issues of equality, war, peace, corrupt politicians, racism and so on. I began to see that popular music was generally used for mere entertainment or escapism, but in the hands of Bob Dylan, and those he influenced, it could also prompt an engagement with life rather than an escape. Since then I’ve observed how virtually every possible aspect of life, including violence, rape, love, hate, sex, suicide, murder, torture, death, companionship, jealousy, addiction, freedom and so on have been confronted in contemporary music to a depth generally unthinkable before Bob Dylan.

Stretching Bruce’s theory a little, you could also say that Dylan Thomas transformed the perhaps traditionally cerebral art form of poetry into something rhythmic and musical. Would you agree?

In a sense, they both arrived at the same point from different starting positions.

Bob brought a level of literacy to a popular music that had been weaned on a diet of moon-June lyrics confined within three minutes songs. Much was made of George Harrison using the word “opaque” in his song ‘Think For Yourself’ in December 1965. But by then Dylan had issued his six-minute-plus ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, ‘Chimes of Freedom, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and other classics that rewrote the book on what was lyrically admissible in rock, folk and pop music. Similarly, Dylan Thomas brought an intensity and a weight to his poetic use of words that did not chime with many general notions of what poetry should be. He didn’t merely “recite” poetry. When performed by Thomas himself his words seemed to hang in the air like solid objects. So I think of both of them as practitioners of “performed literature”.

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The tangibility of Thomas’s words, as you have described it, suggests to me a cinematic quality to his work. Bob Dylan became involved in movies later in his career, so are there particular works by Dylan Thomas that you think would lend themselves to film?

Under Milk Wood has already been filmed to much acclaim with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and again more recently with Michael Sheen and Sian Phillips, and there are many of his stories, such as ‘Return Journey’, ‘A Visit To Grandpa’s’, ‘A Child’s Christmas In Wales’ or ‘A Story’ that all strike me as having a visual quality that invites big or small screen treatment. Much of Bob Dylan’s long narrative songs, such as ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’ have a vivid cinematic quality too, and let’s not forget that Dylan Thomas wrote scripts for many films.

In your lecture Dylan, Dylan and me, you talk of being a teenager and the ‘exhilaration’ of hearing The Beatles for the first time. Was it the same when you discovered Dylan Thomas or was your relationship with poetry something you embarked on as more of a slow-burn?

In a way it was both, an initial exhilaration followed by a slow drawing back for more. Almost every poem by Thomas has a rich, challenging density, so, having a non-academic background, I had to take it in small doses. But those doses soon turned into a veritable addiction! It reminds me of the advice I received from an art expert who told me that on visiting exhibitions it was better to spend some time focusing on a small number of paintings than trying to absorb too many.

That’s still how I approach most music, poetry and paintings today.

Would you therefore have any suggestions as starting points for those people unfamiliar with either artist but who wish to investigate?

The stories I mention above are more accessible than some of Dylan Thomas’s earlier stories which have an unsettling intensity that is often too much for the beginner, as they were for me. There’s a humour in the best of them, as there is in Under Milk Wood, that I suspect will come as a surprise to virgin readers.

I find it hard to imagine that anyone who listens to Thomas’s own recordings of ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’, ‘The Hand That Signed The Paper’, and ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’ will not at least understand his deep attraction for so many others, even if they are not moved themselves to investigate his canon further. I tend to feel that too many people, when engaging with the poems of Dylan Thomas and others, get hung up on meaning, as if poems [ 23 ]

need to be translated into something else in order for us to engage with them. For me, poems are not verbal Rubik’s cubes that function like riddles. I prefer to read and re-read the works and let the poems tell me what they mean. I confront the works for what they are, and what they say, rather than striving for meaning.

The name change from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan prompted speculation about the influence of Dylan Thomas on Bob Dylan. There appears to be little evidence to support this, but both artists reinvented themselves at points during their lives – has this been the key to the popularity of their output?

Bob Dylan himself is very unreliable on the issue of his name change. But Paul Simon referred to Dylan Thomas in a sixties song, and Dylan’s girl-friend Suze Rotolo (that’s her on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album) wondered why or how Bob had a Welsh name. So it’s clear that Dylan Thomas’s name, and presumably his work, was known to literate young Americans in the sixties.

Given that Bob Dylan was so widely read it’s impossible to imagine that he was not aware of Dylan Thomas to some level. But it would be too speculative to go beyond that on the existing evidence. It’s true that both grew as artists and explored different genres and styles, but then many artists do not want to remain static for too long, merely re-ploughing old ground that has nothing new to yield.

But while that can revitalize interest in them, the work they produce must still be worthy of engagement. I don’t believe change on its own prolongs interest in any substantial way.

“The present now will later be past, the order is rapidly fadin’” (from ‘The Times They Are a Changin’ by Bob Dylan).“I have heard many years of telling, and many years should see some change” (from ‘Should Lanterns Shine’ by Dylan Thomas).

Both Dylans spoke of change. Has there been radical change in how we treat each other and the planet since these two poets began to challenge us?

I was inspired by the sixties to embrace a universal optimism that the world in general was getting better on all fronts, that such problems as war, racism, sexism, rape, torture, genocide and so on were gradually being eradicated as we become better humans and more understanding of each other. Looking back at recent history, I’m surprised that I held on to that optimism for so long, especially as both Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas were among the influences that made me a realist first and foremost, and both can be quite pessimistic in their outlook.

Looking at recent events in Nigeria, India, and Syria, among numerous other places, it’s hard to argue that there’s been any change at all, never mind change of a radical nature. But that doesn’t mean that any of us who assume the role of good guys should stop trying!

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Both Dylans were drawn to New York City, specifically the Chelsea Hotel – is there a particular energy in that town that both men were drawn to? When your heartland is the wide open spaces of Minnesota or Wales (or 1960s Sandyford in Dublin where you grew up) what is the allure of a big city?

At a certain age it seems to us that all the excitement is in the cities. We imagine that the city is brimming with exciting cultural developments, activity, noise, people, creativity and power. Even the seamier image of the modern city has its appeal. Yet when it all got too much for Bob Dylan he hid out in rural Woodstock in New York State, and Dylan Thomas was always drawn back to small Welsh seaside towns like Laugharne and New Quay. I suppose that no matter where we are, especially when driven by youthful energy, we believe the real action is always somewhere away from our home turf and we have to go there.

Both artists indulged heavily in alcohol and, in Bob Dylan’s case, whatever drugs were available at various times. So as well as being caustic observers of the world as it was, both artists sought escape from that reality from time to time. Why do you think so many artists come close to the edge with their drug(s) of choice?

I’m sure there are many reasons, and the practice is certainly not new for writers.

Thomas de Quincy indulged in opium as far back as the beginning of the 19th century, and published his Confessions of an English Opium Eater in the 1820s.

In the last century, authors of the calibre of Hemingway, Mailer, Brendan Behan and F Scott Fitzgerald were notorious drunks. Jack Kerouac, Williams Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg used industrial amounts of drink and drugs. Will Self smoked marijuana, then indulged in amphetamines, cocaine, acid and heroin. For some it’s an act of bravado. At times it may simply be a means of escape from the quotidian reality and a means of dealing with the pressures thereof, as well as a way of exploring new territories of the mind in a way that enhances their creative endeavours. In Dylan Thomas’s case, he also revelled in the company that alcohol brought him into. I tend to think of him drinking in company more than drinking alone, although I reckon he did that too.

Bob Dylan is in his seventies, and still performing and recording, whereas Dylan Thomas died at 39. Did the early death of Dylan Thomas somehow elevate his work in a way that may not have happened had he survived? Do you think Dylan Thomas’s work, as we read it in the knowledge of his short life, would have the same effect on us had he reached old age?

[ 25 ]

One could speculate, but it’s a difficult question. Traditionally there’s something allegedly heroic in the creative artist meeting an early death. There’s a long list, including Mozart, Keats, Byron, Sylvia Plath, Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Monroe, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and countless others. To borrow a title from Bob Dylan, these artists remain forever young, and there’s always a sense that they lived life at the edge too. We might assume that their tendency to take risks enabled them to explore regions that most of us don’t dare venture too far into. In the 1949 film Knock On Any Door there’s a famous line by actor John Derek advising us to “Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse!” That apparent courage and sense of reckless derring-do has its appeal, just as we admire arctic explorers or the first men into space or atop Everest. So their early deaths bring a kind of deification, and their body of work doesn’t have to run the risk of being sullied by a later loss of contact with their muse.

How do you see the two Dylans in terms of their attitudes to woman? Did they differ?

Both seemed to be enormously attractive to women, but that’s almost automatic with famous artists across all genres anyway. If a geeky, shy 16-year-old lad wants to attract girl-friends, it seems all he has to do is join a rock or pop band and they queue up! Dylan Thomas seemed to need female company more for reasons of comfort and cosseting than for sex. It started with his mother Florence, who was constantly fretting over his health and well-being, and even his wife Caitlin used to spoon-feed him milk and bread as one would a baby. He used his ailments, some of which were exaggerated, if not totally imaginary, to generate sympathy from women, and it worked time and time again.

And Bob? Bob Dylan is much more secretive about his private life, but he has been married at least twice and enjoyed a string of liaisons with women, including singers Joan Baez and Carolyn Dennis. His first wife Sara was the subject matter for several songs or parts thereof. He also upset some feminists with the lyrics of ‘Just Like A Woman’ and ‘Is Your Love in Vain’. They were particularly incensed with the latter and its lines “Can you cook and sew, make flowers grow, can you understand my pain?” They objected to his portrayal of women in the stereotypical role of mere helpmates for men, but Dylan simply ignored their comments, as he does with most criticism.

[ 26 ]

The work of both Dylans can be by turn playful and deadly serious – a versatility that appears to be lacking in today’s artists, particularly in music. Who from today’s crop would be comparable in your opinion?

The volume of material that the Internet makes available to us is so overwhelming it’s impossible to pay proper attention to more than a fraction of it. This has advantages, but also has its downside. We are already facing into a future where buying an album or a book of poems or stories, and having the time to concentrate on the works at length and with little distraction, is probably going to happen less and less. Consequently, artists who might be comparable to either Dylans may enjoy some long-term success in a niche market, or attract a level of worldwide acclaim that will fulfil Andy Warhol’s prediction. But I say this with no instinct for what the next invention will be or how it will impact on our engagement with art of all kinds. The upside of the Internet is that virtually everything written by both Dylans is now available to all at the click of a mouse.

You seem to have a genuine fondness for Wales. Aside from your interest in Dylan Thomas, what is it that makes you visit time and time again?

There’s a seriousness and a slight sombreness to Wales and the Welsh people I’ve met that appeals to me. I think of it as a form of the blues, or the duende of Spain that Federico Garcia Lorca was so enthralled by. Besides, I have an aversion to anything twee or sentimental or too frivolous. And yet Wales’ rich culture makes room for humour and the sort of human eccentricity that appealed to DT. There’s a musicality to the language that I particularly like in Welsh songs, and I’m convinced that although DT did not speak Welsh he was very much aware of its resonance and musicality. I can even hear Wales in his voice.

[ 27 ]

Teaching Dylan Thomas’s Muse to speak Welsh Menna Elfyn

Once she was a mockery, the crone in the empty park, old, impotent, hunchbacked — but today things are different; I sit beside her, teaching her words of weight — drawing her to say them after me: Trees, oh how mighty they are, with the might of the Welsh: and dŵr, see how water purrs in Welsh when it’s splashed from a fountain.

And then, I teach her two words – adar and trydar, the wings and the light; and now no one will shout harsh words after her because the words will be in her mouth.

I will be the park-keeper, going homewards knowing that she is not homeless; far away I hear her pronounce: Coed cadarn, Cedyrn y Cymry, dŵr and adar;

[ 28 ]

and her words will be drops flung from a fountain, rising like flying wings.

Now her stick, spearing dead leaves in the park will turn them, turn herself into a living green.

Translated from the Welsh by Elin ap Hywel

[ 29 ]

Dysgu Cymraeg i Awen Dylan Thomas Menna Elfyn

Un i wneud hwyl am ei phen Oedd hi unwaith, Wrth gael ei gweld Mewn parc gwag— Hen ddynes grwca heb ei medru hi.

Ond heddi, nid felly y mae; Eistedd wrth ei hochr a wnaf, A dysgu iddi eiriau pwysig Ei chael i ddweud ar fy ôl,: Coed, O, rhai cadarn ydynt, Cedyrn y Cymry; A dŵr, sbiwch fel y mae dŵr yn treiglo Y d-d-d- yn disgyn, wedi tasgu o bistyll.

Ac yna adar. Dysgaf iddi ddau air – Trydar ac adar; Yr adenydd a’r ehedeg; Ac ni fydd rhai’n gweiddi geiriau cras Ar ei hôl, Achos yn ei genau bydd geiriau i’w chynnal.

[ 30 ]

A byddaf fel ceidwad y parc yn mynd tua thre, Gan wybod nad yw’n ddigartre, Ac o bell,clywaf eiriau’n seinio Dros bob lle: Yn Abertawe.

Coed cadarn, Cedyrn y Cymry, Dŵr, ac adar, A bydd ei geiriau‘n ddiferion, O bistyll, Yn codi, fel adenydd sy’n ehedeg.

A bydd ei ffon o hyn allan Yn pigo dail marw o’r parc A’u troi yn las, Mor las â thafod hen wraig grwca yn y parc.

[ 31 ]

Images of Laugharne Paintings by Guy Manning

Above the Spring Taff

[ 32 ]

Below the Beech, Above the Taff

[ 33 ]

Rosebay Field, Laugharne

[ 34 ]

Drift Woods

[ 35 ]

Sobre el Bosc Lactian extract Dic Edwards In 2003 Catalan writer Albert Mestres was given a fellowship with Swansea University. The terms of the fellowship necessitated his choosing a play from the canon of Welsh drama which he was to translate. He chose Over Milk Wood: my playful response to Dylan’s famous work. The result was Sobre el Bosc Lacti which was subsequently published by Arola Editors of Tarragona also in 2003.

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Over Milk Wood an extract Dic Edwards

10. On board ship for Liverpool.

Sound of ship’s hooter etc.

SINEAD is standing at prow of the ship.

SINEAD: And so I sailed out of New York for Liverpool, Wales and Milk Wood. I had a mission! I was going to save my husband from whatever it was this play was doing to him and give me and my baby a future. And I stood proud at prow day after day, steadfast. A few days out and we hit a bank of mist. It was at dusk. After about an hour in this mist I became aware of someone standing beside me.

ROGER stands beside her.

He wears glasses.

ROGER:

Hello.

SINEAD:

Hello.

ROGER:

My name is Roger.

SINEAD: Roger.

ROGER: I’ve seen you standing here at the front of the ship day after day.

You’re like someone with a mission. As if you’re willing the land to you.

[ 53 ]

SINEAD: Well in a way that’s true. My husband is….um… ill in New York.

He’s from Wales and I’m going back there to see if I can find any relatives of his.

ROGER:

O.

SINEAD:

O what?

ROGER:

You’re married.

SINEAD:

I am, yes!

ROGER:

O well.

Pause.

SINEAD:

(A little mischievously) Were you wanting to make a pass at me?

ROGER:

I’m sorry. You’ve got…

SINEAD:

Lovely eyes. I know. Well…all the better to see through you with.

ROGER:

I’m sorry. Excuse me…

SINEAD:

He begins to go.

It’s alright! You don’t need to go!

Pause.

ROGER:

What part of Wales are you going to?

SINEAD:

Why? Do you know it?

ROGER:

O yes. I’m Welsh.

SINEAD:

You don’t sound it.

ROGER: (Suddenly sounds very Welsh) Aha! And that is SO important to the Welsh. Well observed! You’ve got me onto my favourite subject: when are the Welsh Welsh and are the sounds a Welshman makes more important than the sense he makes with them?

[ 54 ]

SINEAD:

You sound Welsh now.

ROGER: A professional! On the other hand, do I? Perhaps to the Irish or my students. But to the Welsh-speaking Welsh I only sound like a certain kind of Welshman. A Welshman without the language of Welsh. That’s what I’m saying.

A Welshman who speaks Welsh makes a different sound.

SINEAD:

Well he would from someone speaking English!

ROGER: But it leaves the Welsh without Welsh in a kind of limbo. Part of a nation they can’t belong to. As though they were evicted.

SINEAD:

SINEAD gasps.

That’s what Huw said!

ROGER: Living on the street outside their own home. Cast out and always wanting to come back. This is typical of the ex-pat Welshman like me: always returning like it’s a disease. It makes us seem ill-defined; without purpose; shifty: the Taffy!

SINEAD:

This sounds so much like my husband’s problem!

ROGER:

It’s almost like a curse.

SINEAD gasps.

ROGER:

In my case made more acute by being a Welshman called Roger.

SINEAD:

You said “curse”!

ROGER: O yes. And it infects everything. And you hear a Welshman abroad and he wants to SOUND as Welsh as possible. Do you know the play Under Milk Wood?

SINEAD:

Yu…yes.

ROGER:

It’s mostly sound with little apparent substance. I know! I teach it!

SINEAD:

You teach that play? [ 55 ]

ROGER: The Life and Works of Dylan Thomas. SOUND, mun! You see?

The word is even in the way we express ourselves.

SINEAD’s mouth falls open.

ROGER: Are you alright?

SINEAD: It’s because of him and that play that I’m going….Look, I can’t tell you now, it’s a long story, my husband is the model for one of the characters in Under Milk Wood….

ROGER:

(Shocked) Which one?

SINEAD:

Mr. Pugh.

ROGER: well…

Pugh! So! He’s in New York! I’ve traced most of the models! Well,

SINEAD:

What about Mrs. Pugh? Is she still alive?

ROGER:

He lied didn’t he?

SINEAD:

How d’you know?

ROGER:

He’s Welsh, mun!

SINEAD: Don’t say that! Is she still alive?

ROGER:

Was he drunk?

SINEAD:

Who?

ROGER:

Huw! When he lied.

SINEAD:

Well…yes…but…

ROGER:

It’s alright. It’s a familiar pattern.

SINEAD:

Is she still alive?

[ 56 ]

Pause.

ROGER: Mrs. Pugh was a large woman who, after he left lived almost entirely in her single bed. One morning not long after his departure, adrift in her loneliness and the meanness of her thin bed, her memory of her size and the care needed to manoeuvre her bulk in her narrow world, abandoned her and she fell out and died. They said it was a broken heart. But it was a broken chamber pot. It disembowelled her.

SINEAD:

Poor woman!

ROGER:

The undertaker said it was like cleaning out a cow shed.

SINEAD:

Pause.

Urrrrghhh! That’s disgusting!

ROGER: Yes. Probably a Welsh joke. But, she is certainly dead. Listen: Hugh’s lie would have been intended to be without great consequence.

Pause.

SINEAD: It must be in the nature of a man who can allow himself to be cursed by a mere play that he’ll tell a great lie and consider it inconsequential whereas it is a most serious thing to a woman who has had to leave her past because of the on-going cruelty of her history.

ROGER: Is this how you want to go back to him? To torment him with his lie? I think not. Forget it. Instead, flush out the curse and help him!

SINEAD:

(Tearfully) I must! I know! Where is the town of the play?

ROGER:

Nowhere!

SINEAD:

(Horrified) What? No! Don’t say that!

ROGER: It’s an amalgam - of Swansea, Laugharn and New Quay. The three sea-places Dylan lived in in Wales. (Pause) What you need is night.

SINEAD:

Night? [ 57 ]

ROGER: The play is written in three sections: morning, day and night.

But Dylan died before he could really work on the night section and as a result, nothing was decided. And after he died, those who knew him best – his drinking friends – people like Pugh, became like the shipwrecked: all at sea, living in a mist of indecision, a greater mood of indecision than was already the bane of their lives, uncertain about who they were or where they were going. Because he died so suddenly. There is just one clue that may help you. Right at the end of the play as we come towards night, First Voice says: In the warm white book of Llaregyb you will find the little maps of the island of their contentment.

You must go to the book .

SINEAD:

But where is it? Where is the White Book of Llaregyb?

ROGER:

You will find it in New Quay. In the Black Lion Hotel.

SINEAD:

The Black Lion Hotel. How will I get there?

tape).

ROGER goes and his voice becomes an echo (on

ROGER’s VOICE: In Liverpool, get a train for Aberystwyth. You will have to change probably at Crewe and Shrewsbury. In Aberystwyth get a bus to Aberaeron where you can get another bus to Llanarth. In Llanarth you must go to the Post Office and ask for Ivor Bach and he will take you by taxi to New Quay. To New Quay and The Black Lion Hotel.

11.

Black Lion Hotel, New Quay.

Behind the bar is CAPTAIN SIGHTLESS SMITH. (He wears blanked off glasses).

SMITH: O sad is me for I smell but cannot see the sea. But I can hear the lap of tide like a cat licking milk and am thus sound in my sightlessness.

SINEAD comes on.

[ 58 ]

SMITH:

Captain Sightless Smith old sod of the sea at your service.

SINEAD:

Sightless? (Pause) You’re Captain Cat!

SMITH: And you are Irish – from the North but a Catholic because there is some South in there too. And now you live in America where you went to flee the inequalities of life in the six lost counties of Ulster. But you have come to Wales on a mission. To New Quay. To The Black Lion Hotel to ask for…

SINEAD:

(Breathless) The White Book…..

SMITH: O you sweet breath of dawn! You beautiful enquirer. I thought we were done for for only the non-Welsh can lay their hands upon the book! And I don’t mean the Welsh of Non the saintly mother of David our Saint beyond all sainthood, but those who are not Welsh but altogether something else! Only the non-Welsh with a mission to save the soul of one washed away in the flood of Dylan’s imagination!

SINEAD:

Where is it! Is it here?

SMITH:

No, no! Buried!

SINEAD:

(Horrified) Buried? But where!

SMITH: You must go to the hill above the Old Quarry. On the hillside you will find an old oak. You can’t miss it. On the trunk is carved a heart and inside the heart the words: Dylan loves Caitlin. Stand there at midnight tonight! You’ll hear the drunken boys roll out of the bars…

We hear distant sounds of late night revellers.

HUW: ….peeing their way to their fish and chips and vomit in the vicar’s lavender and the high pitched cries of the laughing girls as their skirts get blown waist high by no-good boyos. And you will hear the bell toll for midnight(We hear bell toll) Beneath this tree there is a stone and beneath the stone is the book. At midnight…..

We hear the faint sound of sea and seagulls and begin to hear the low murmer of The Voices as midnight begins to chime and throughout the chiming The Voices [ 59 ]

get louder and SINEAD looks about her fearfully and wraps her coat around her.

Then we hear the sound of wind and SINEAD gasps and cowers. There may even be thunder and crashing lightning and SINEAD cries out almost hopelessly.

VOICE OF SMITH: …..pick up the stone and lift the book.

She does this as he speaks.

V.O.S.: Open the book and within the shortest time you will feel his breath…..

SINEAD:

(Fearful) Who!

V.O.S.: And he will be there.

SINEAD:

(Opening book) Who!

VOICE OF DYLAN’s GHOST:

Listen!

Everything suddenly goes quiet.

The voice of DYLAN’s GHOST should echo

loudly.

SINEAD gasps looking around her but can

see nothing.

V.O.D.G.: I am here on this hill and on every dewed blade of grass in every moled or moleless hole on every rabbit run track, sliding up the back of every sly besmooched lover licking their lips with a breath of lavender.

SINEAD:

Who are you?

V.O.D.G.:

I am Dylan. You have come because of Huw.

SINEAD:

Yes! Help me! Help Huw!

Silence.

After a moment we hear sobbing coming from DYLAN’s GHOST.

V.O.D.G.: (Sadly) It was only a play. The drinkers of the West Wales world hated me just as the melancholic of Wales have always hated their best as though the best come to haunt them with their less than bestness and they would mix

[ 60 ]

envy with their grog. I would carouse with them till the early hours with Caitlin my stalwart bride and drinking pal beside me and they would hang from every little ditty I’d sing and every tale from the fabled Big Apple I’d bite. But in the days without me in their little gangs huddling useless with no future or past they would curse my world-wiseness and say as the Welsh do: who does he think he is?

Is he a philosopher or a surgeon or a politician? No! HE IS A WIND BAG! SINEAD:

But what about Huw?!

DYLAN: O I mourn for Huw if the dead can mourn though they should because it’s in their gift to know the sad sounds of eternity. One night, to brag a worldliness, he said of his middle-aged wife who would moan about his moonlighting, that one morning he’ll do for her like Crippen did for his. I’d had enough of this two-faced flounder! And so, as is the way with sailors of dreams - the writers of the world - I repaid him for his niggardly predispositions. But I didn’t know I was going to die! It was meant as a literary joke that I would put right in the rewriting. Close the book and all will be well!

SINEAD: him!

No! Not yet! The curse! You must take it away! The play cursed

DYLAN’S GHOST: The play did not curse him, it cursed ME! I turn in my grave when I think how the English have made of me, through that play, the final Welshman!

It’s kept the Welsh of Welshless Wales down while it’s made a bomb in the States!

When I was out there I drank gallons in my loneliness. It made me cowardly and, becoming a coward in this way I drank more. I would want to come back but there is never anything but unwantedness to come back to for cowards! Close the book and remember me not for the play but for the poems; as a poet of the soul!

SINEAD:

But what about Huw’s curse?!

DYLAN’S GHOST:

It’s his cowardice! Close the book! I’m in pain!

SINEAD closes the book.

There is a W-O-O-O-O-S-S-S-H-H-H

as Dylan’s Ghost leaves.

SINEAD lets out a cry of joy.

Lights down.

[ 61 ]

12. Hospital.

HUW is standing looking calmer.

SINEAD comes on.

Silence.

HUW: There was a young woman from Limerick

Who thought she was going to be heartsick

So she went to the Wood

And there understood.

SINEAD comes to HUW. SINEAD: me?.

Huw. If I said your curse was your cowardice, would you hate

HUW:

No. (Pause) I’ve known.

SINEAD:

You’ve known?

HUW:

Yes.

SINEAD:

So why didn’t you say so?

HUW:

Because I was too cowardly to. Until now.

HUW:

Pause.

They look at each other in silence for a moment.

Forgive me?

Silence.

SINEAD goes to HUW. They embrace.

Lights down.

[ 62 ]

Three versions out of Dylan Thomas Philip Gross

March 25th, 2013... 5 Cwmdonkin Drive was full of translators called together by Prof. Alexis Nuselovici of the Cardiff School of European Languages, Translation and Politics, and Bambo Soyinka of Book Kernel, a digital platform allowing a live event to be transformed into a published book within one day. Our day was called, in Dylan’s words, In Your Translating Eyes. After an introduction by John Goodby, 11 translators would be carrying his texts, live, into Catalan, Dutch, French, Frisian, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, and Welsh. And me, sad near-monoglot in the corner? I would be translating into English.

That sounds like a joke, maybe a barbed one at DT’s expense. It was not. Within each language there are many languages, of register, of frames of reference, of genre, of their place in time. Each of the three ‘translations’ here opens another door within the strange apartment block of English. Or maybe ‘transpositions’ is the word we need.

And Dylan invites it, surely? From the start, his poems are chopping and splicing their references, putting strain on clichés and folk sayings to see what associations they release. On ‘In the Beginning’ takes stanza 4 of Dylan’s poem, almost line by line, and relocates it from space resonant with the Bible and Shakespeare to... well, Shakespeare again, in the computer age.

My version of Once It Was The Colour Of Saying literally took each line as a unit (which, syntactically, is nearly true) and responded to it as if this were the literary game of renga, with one haiku linking to another. In its Zen-inflected way (the frog jumps, ripples spread out) renga is creative response. Maybe it does, after all, honour Dylan, to translate him not so much into English as into a sensibility that is just slightly Japanese?

[ 63 ]

Different languages aside, all reading of poetry - all good deep reading - is translation. What it translates might not be simply words. At the age of 15 I read Thomas as a vehicle for all my adolescent overweeningness. I spent half my adult life forgiving him for that (which was hardly his fault). On’On no work of words’ connects with his strugglesome poem about writer’s block, offering him the music of light verse. Light... except that (just ask Edward Lear, whose sound is somewhere in this) lightness can weave us through the thickets, to a heartfelt place. I wanted to play with Dylan, by the day’s end. Not to play at his expense. More than twice the age of the man who wrote On no work of words, I wanted to offer him that.

On ’In The Beginning’

Click. The Logos

logged on and a flicker of binary – yea / nay – was the code. The database. The lexicon.

Voice recognition.

Diaphragm and lung supported it, uploading their To be or not to be

to blood, to beat, to tongue.

Dylan Thomas: In the beginning was the word, the word That from the solid bases of the light Abstracted all the letters of the void; And from the cloudy bases of the breath The word flowed up, translating to the heart First characters of birth and death.

(In The Beginning, stanza 4)

[ 64 ]

On ’Once It Was The Colour Of Saying’ – a line-by-live gloss in haiku 1 child’s poster-colour pigments, dabbled, slapped onto the surface of time 2 it wasn’t me! – when you’re born at a slant to the world things upset themselves 3 too much gravity to play in safely – hold on to teacher’s sound words 4 the flowers of past time blossom into monochrome – its fond uniform 5 retreating shingledrag of recollecting what the sea won’t let go 6 it’s the distortions of clear water give mermaids their glittering teeth 7 stealing the time from the school day, see how it pools to be tapped later

[ 65 ]

8 defending ourselves with stone age tools against what we didn’t yet know 9 a fine and private grace, to be laid together in the last resort 10 grown-ups! their secret language of nuance - painting grey on grey on grey 11 don’t expect steady illumination – one forked flash will have to do 12 shuck off the words, unpick me, my breath bound in to speaking this here now 13 back into wind dance and tide tumble, smoothing stone to sigh and so away

Dylan Thomas: Once it was the colour of saying Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill With a capsized field where a school sat still And a black and white patch of girls grew playing; The gentle seaslides of saying I must undo That all the charmingly drowned arise to cockcrow and kill. [ 66 ]

When I whistled with mitching boys through a reservoir park Where at night we stoned the cold and cuckoo Lovers in the dirt of their leafy beds, The shade of their trees was a word of many shades And a lamp of lightning for the poor in the dark; Now my saying shall be my undoing, And every stone I wind off like a reel.

(Once It Was The Colour Of Saying)

On ‘On no work of words’ This is the place between give and take,

the breath out, the breath in,

the thick and the thin

and the where to begin of a lonely Welsh boy on the make for dear life, for the making, for everything’s sake.

But what is he making, and can it be all

between given and get,

between credit and debt

and what he’s not yet in the upstairs room with custard cream walls?

And who is he now when the word machine stalls?

This is the space where the words stand apart

and he’s caught in their lock.

Between tick and tock

and the bench and the dock he stands accused by his own sullen art.

He’s finished.

He has yet to start.

[ 67 ]

Dylan Thomas: On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft: To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven, The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.

To lift to leave from treasures of man is pleasing death That will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath And count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark.

To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.

Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas If I take to burn or return this world which is each man’s work.

[ 68 ]

Green and Dying Eloise Williams

‘I want to see the world,’ she whispers. Sitting on a sodden bench in Laugharne.

Watching the rain fill the khaki estuary plop by sullen drip. A broken slug chip squashed to the back of her too tight coat. Her copper hair limp, fog-saturated, yet struggling for the horizon still. She thinks of herself as a lighthouse.

The words taste bland as she speaks them. Like an anorexic’s cotton-wool filling her mouth with bulk and dry. Nevertheless she tries to bait them back. They disobey, scoot eddies to take flight on a curlew’s beak, later to be dropped into tidal flats in place of a salted worm. Buried but bubbling up.

He’s had enough of her showing off, of trudging the beige days alone to sup bitter drinks at Browns. Of scoffing at toothy Americans with their zest and lanyards and hopes. Of scoffing at orange locals with their hopes of being Americans. Her tattooed arm signals freedom and want and it isn’t his name she’s put there.

She fingers the words, scabbing and fresh, and picks at the pain to feel life.

He leaves her now. Scarring the dark lanes with angry stamps. Kicking at dribbling bluebells. Watching the wishes of dandelion clocks drown in the gurgling drains. Laugharnies draw heavy curtains against him and the poems that thrum at the glass.

‘I sang in my chains.’ She makes the words bleed. Mouths a dying mantra in the crow-cawed castle’s shadow. Willing the sacred cement to seep through bone to the top of her knee length socks, infect her with Caitlin and courage, or else turn her to stone.

[ 69 ]

Maes Y Bryn (After Fern Hill) Emma Baines

Now as I was young and faceless beside the setting sun Scorching the rooftops black and blank as the grit was grey, The slab beneath the knee-crook bedded, Light struck me blind and roared Orange from the last match head of day, And silent in my parka I shadowed the early sunrise And once fused I carried the grit from the pavement-gaps and dust Trail of bike spokes and tyres ‘round the back yard of the gripping dark.

And as I was grey and careful, slipping Across the blank houses to whisper from the chimney pots To the sun that rises and falls, Light struck me dumb and fizzed Orange with the spoils of the ground, And grey and orange I was ashes and embers, the calves Breathed day to life, the foxes, slinky at the edges and brushed, And the morning pierced cruelly Through the lashes of our hooded eyes.

[ 70 ]

All the sun long we were blinking, it was dawning, the bare Fields seeded the air, the stone from the furrows, it was flint And sparking, dawning and ploughing up And fire grey as ash.

And bedded over the crooked slab As I rose to dawn the dolls were wishing the night away, All the moon long catching dew-tears in their eye-crook, the raven Scratching at the dust and honey bees Pollinating the light.

And then to awake, and the night, like a starless soul That is lost, turned back, no ground beneath its feet: it was all Shifting, it was Eve and her saplings, The black rooftops lifted And the sun drew shadows with sticks.

So it has always been, from the birth of the simple light In the first pulsing space, the busying bees’ sweet nectar Out of the wintering grey desert Bleeding the fields of spring.

And silent among foxes and stray cats at the doorstep Watching the path of light and hungry as the day was long, In the sun, shot from tap root, A slow germination, My wishes bare-bound to seeds on air And deep barbs planted in the pavement dust that light embeds In all her darkest corners so wild and such hypnosis Before the embers grey and orange Smouldered to prick the dark, Everything there, through the tyre swing the light would draw me Along the cuckoo-spit stem by the flesh of my bones In the moon that is always rising And that rising to dawn I should keep her sowing the bare fields And sleep amongst the chimney pots charred with a childish voice.

Oh as I was young and faceless in the mercy of morning, Light held me grey and burning, Though I smelted my chains like the sun.

[ 71 ]

An annotation of Fern Hill John Goodby

Written at Blaen Cwm, Llangain in Carmarthenshire, in late summer September 1945. On 18 September 1945, Thomas returned the corrected proofs of DE to Dent’s with ‘Fern Hill’ and ‘In my craft and sullen art’, new poems he asked to be added to the volume. Extra space had to be found for ‘Fern Hill’, but as Thomas explained ‘I very much want it included as it is an essential part of the feeling & meaning of the book as a whole.’ Published in Horizon (October 1945); collected DE.

The title is a version of ‘Fernhill’, the farm near Blaen Cwm owned by Thomas’s aunt Ann Jones (cf. ‘After the funeral’). It is a fitting climax to DE’s remembrancing of Thomas’s childhood and elegising of childhood more generally, following the end of the war. It is his best-loved poem, and is unabashedly nostalgic, pulling out all the rhetorical stops — in particular a fluid, breathlessseeming syntax — to enact the unconstrained pleasures of childhood. Yet this success is only the pre-condition for a subtle manipulation of the child’s selective vision and fantasies of omnipotence, adult recollection of these, and the irony implicit in the contrast between them. The result is complex and intensely bittersweet; in Thomas’s words, it is ‘a poem for evenings and tears’ and ‘that joyful poem’. Not just about how it feels to be young but how it feels to have been young, its easy-going manner belies its intricate constructedness; systematic phrasal manipulation, lexical repetition, colour-patterning, the use of leitmotifs, all indicate larger, cosmic and symbolic symmetries (it can, for example, be read as a six-day creation poem, in which the alternation of day and night is central, the sun appearing in every stanza). The narrative is that of growing towards death within a sacramentalised nature, an exploration of the nature of innocence, which became the theme of much of the later work, including Under Milk Wood, as Thomas leaves behind the more materialist and concrete aspects of his process

[ 72 ]

poetic, and accesses the potency of religious feeling, if not of belief, more deeply than before.

The poem’s Keatsian sensuous intelligence and partaking of the cult of childhood and the autumnal apple, its unashamed oral pleasures, make it seem purely Romantic. However, it is also a version of modernist pastoral, and its utopian ‘anarchic paradise of play’ presided over by the timelessness of the id, and its maternal cradling motion, have been linked by Stewart Crehan (1990) to the radical optimism of 1945 and the ‘New Jerusalem’ of Attlee’s Labour government, elected a few months before it was written. It is also one of his first poems to make an open display of allusion to poems in the English pastoral tradition, as subversively signalled by the altered farm name — this manages to seem both more English - and suburban-seeming than its original and to indicate a more expansive, wilder greenness. English and Welsh stereotypes, places, names, religiosity, and idioms are subtly interwoven to create a text which, in the words of James A. Davies (1998), is set in ‘poetical marches … like the Welsh Marches … a place of great beauty … [and] cultural forces, often in tension, but that combine as much as compete.’

Form: six nine-line stanzas, with a syllabic count of 14-14-9-6-9-14-14 in the first seven lines of each stanza; final couplets of 7-9 (stanzas 1 and 2); 9-6 (stanzas 3, 4 and 5); 7-9 (stanza 6). End-rhyme is assonantal (e.g. maiden-againstable), and the tight, circular form approximates that of the sestina.

1 Now as I was = establishes the immediate timeless present of childhood, but ‘now … was’ creates a grammatical paradox, an ambiguous tense between past and present, into which the poem emerges to mingle tenses and times; young and easy = from ‘free and easy’; apple-boughs = a central symbol; apples are the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, the speaker is the apple of Time’s eye, apples are both ‘green’ and ‘golden’.

2 lilting = synaesthetic description of the house as musical; happy as the grass is green = from ‘happy as the day is long’, but sadly ironic: the day of grass is not long, and ‘as for man, his days are as grass’, as in Psalms 103 and the Book of Common Prayer.

3 dingle = small wooded valley; cf. Auden’s ‘Look, Stranger’ (‘Doom is darker and deeper than any sea-dingle’) and Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Scholar Gipsy’ (‘listen … From the dark dingles to the nightingales’); starry = as in Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’, ‘starry night’.

4 Time let me hail and climb = the image is of Time driving a ‘wagon’ loaded with apples, which the young boy signals (‘hails’) to stop, and climbs aboard.

5 Golden = suggests ‘golden boy’, but following ‘green’ also hints at autumn, soon followed by winter; heydays = days gone by; pun on ‘hay’ (harvest) days. [ 73 ]

Cf. Thomas Hardy’s ‘Regret Not Me’, one of the poem’s sources: ‘I did not know / That heydays fade and go, / But deemed what was would always be so.’

6 prince = as in a fairy story; apple towns = apple orchards.

7 once below a time = inversion of the traditional fairytale opening, which has the child both ‘out of time to all appearances’ and ‘in time, subject of and to a time and future subject of another.’ It is also implied that if something can exist on the surface flow of time it may exist below it in the timeless present of the unconscious. This phrase is the title of a 1940 poem (see above).

7-8 I lordly had … daisies and barley = he decorated the orchard with garlands of barley and daisies. Like ‘prince’, the security of ‘lordly’ grows increasingly poignant.

9 windfall light = ‘windfall’ is fruit which has been blown down before picking, hence, unripe; but also, metaphorically, an unlooked-for bonus.

13-14 Time let me play and be / Golden = the enjambement allows several senses; time lets the boy be golden; lets him exist; leaves him alone.

15 I was huntsman and herdsman = the boy’s rapturous self-sufficiency resembles Thomas Traherne’s in Centuries of Meditation: ‘all the World was mine; and I the only Spectator and Enjoyer of it.’

16 sang to my horn = from the nursery rhyme ‘Little Boy Blue’, but with hint of childhood sexuality; foxes = wild animals, contrasted with the domesticated calves.

17-18 the sabbath rang … holy streams = indicates the Welsh context; the Oscar Williams letter describes a ‘farm labourer who told me that the stream that runs by his cottage side is Jordan water and who can deny him’.

19-21 All the sun long = because the sun is the day to the child.

20-22 suggestion of the four classical elements of air, water, fire, and earth.

20 tunes from the chimneys = synaesthetic image for smoke rising and falling like musical modulations.

24-9 Cf. note on object permanence to ‘The Hunchback in the Park’.

25 nightjars = nocturnal birds with a reputation for stealthy flight; also known as the fern owl.

30 Adam and maiden = not Eve, in order to stress that it was the boy’s world alone, and its purity; cf. Vaughan, ‘The Rapture’, ‘Only what Adam in his first Estate, / Did I behold’; George Meredith, ‘Love in the Valley’, ‘Maiden still the morn is’. Self-sufficiency is enacted in a cynghanedd-like mirroring of vowels: a d m / m a d.

33-34 So it must have been = the adult speaker consciously tries to place childhood experience for the first time.

35 spinning place = because the earth spins.

36 fields of praise = alludes to Christian Eden and pagan Elysian Fields. [ 74 ]

40 heedless = Thomas told Brinnin ‘ran my heedless ways!—that’s bloody bad!’, but it signals the more analytical, abstract adult consciousness initiated at this point.

42 sky blue trades = links the child’s play to heaven.

43 turning = cf. ‘Poem in October’; morning songs = cf. ‘Our morning hymn is this’, in Sidney’s ‘Ye Goatherd Gods’.

44-45 the children … Follow him out of grace = like the children who follow the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

46 time would take me … loft = the speaker as ‘man-as-grass’ anticipates being cut and stored in the hay-loft of death; lamb white = of Christ-like purity (and sacrifice).

47 swallow thronged = cf. Keats’s ‘To Autumn’: ‘And gathering swallows twitter in the skies’; by the shadow of my hand = the subject of ‘take me’ in l.46.

53 held = applied to ‘chains’ in l.54, means ‘chained up’; applied to ‘mercy’ in l.52 it means ‘cradled’, ‘supported’; green and dying = ‘green’ still denotes youth and growth, but now also rot.

54 Though I sang in my chains like the sea = the sea sings in tides and waves because it is ‘chained’ by the gravity of earth and moon (cf. ‘moonchained’, ‘Ballad of the Long-legged Bait’). Thomas echoes Rousseau’s ‘Man is born everywhere in chains’, but ‘sings’ the chains of mortality, defying them through the chains of his art. Cf. Donne, ‘The Triple Foole’: ‘I thought, if I could draw my paines, / Through Rimes vexation, I should them allay. / Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, / For he tames it, that fetters it in verse.’

[ 75 ]

The murder of Dylan Thomas Mark Blayney

This is a memoir of a strange town, and of how my first attempts to become a journalist were shaped and eroded there. I was sent to cover a minor scandal, in the last days of newspapers. Now I’m old it’s strange to look back. I certainly didn’t realise then, as a gauche 18-year-old, how influential that weekend would be.

I was sent as a cub reporter; how quaint, centuries-old, that expression sounds now. Covered the scandal in the space of an afternoon; everyone in the town seemed to know every detail and it wasn’t hard to email back a competent report by evening. But I was there for the weekend, and the editor told me to stay and enjoy myself.

My hotel, Seaview, had once been the home of Dylan Thomas. I didn’t know who he was because we didn’t get taught him at school, and I quickly became embarrassed about this as everyone in the town seemed to be talking about him.

The flashes of conversation as I walked by the castle, along the estuary and beside the grand Georgian houses, were almost always about the same thing. Have you been down to the boathouse yet? And, This was the pub where he would drink, and write.

It was, as hotels were in those days, simply furnished and spacious. Dark wood, I remember. Or was it light? I should have taken pictures. I remember the outside, anyway: canary yellow, and although it had been renovated only a couple of years before, damp was discolouring the facade, breaking through as if insistent that the rough and ready of the house had to be on display, despite all attempts to paper it over.

Pictures of Dylan and his wife leaning in to each other, eyes closed, clinging on to the other’s frayed clothing. They possessed nothing, said the owner at breakfast as I looked at the photos. He had one suit, which was covered with ink.

[ 76 ]

He only owned what he needed – a roof over his head, paper, pen. His only real possession was a bicycle.

They were always drunk, he added, nodding towards the pictures. They look drunk, don’t they?

They did, they looked very drunk. I ate breakfast, which was huge and glossy, and looked at the estuary and marvelled at the silence.

The boathouse where Thomas lived for the last few years of his life propagated the legend. Everything was boxed behind glass, preserved, stuffed. A set of cufflinks, the only ones he ever had, and true to form he gave them away. A video on a loop described in rhythmic, bassooned Welsh vowels how, on the night he died at 39 he declared, I’ve just had eighteen straight whiskies, I think that’s the record. An elderly woman in front of me gasped.

Later I saw her with the rest of her party, boarding a yellow coach. How much do you have to drink, I wondered, to collapse into a coma and die so young? The coach chugged to itself like an impatient cat.

According to the iPad he spent so much time in Browns pub that he gave their phone number as his own. I was surprised to see it open for business, as the iPad said it was closed. I realised as I stepped through the door that it may have just re-opened; the marble tiles on the floor were brand new and it smelled of paint.

The bar was, I remember, dusty and dark and full of old men. Or maybe it was light and airy, full of cushions and bold, colourful pictures. There was someone smoking a pipe, but that must have been someone outside, or perhaps he didn’t have any tobacco in the pipe, as this was several years after the smoking ban.

An attractive young man behind the bar served me a shy coffee, blushing as he spilt the milk. Some men at the side table looked at me. Japanese tourists in colourful, see-through macs, even though it wasn’t raining, appeared in the doorway. They wanted to know where he wrote, where he drank.

He sat by the window, the young barman piped up. Click. The tourists took souvenirs. Click. Against the light their macs made them transparent like sweet wrappers; purple, pink, green.

I took my cup and saucer to the bar. There was a swirl like a question mark at the bottom of the cup. Do you want to come to a party, the barman asked. I nodded. It’s tomorrow, he said, there’s a big wedding going on. Everyone’s going.

I can’t go to a wedding, I said. He said don’t worry about it, it’s the evening, not the wedding itself. You can be my plus one. He poured me a glass of ale, which I couldn’t drink. [ 77 ]

Dressing, I watched a steady stream of people make their way down to the chapel.

Fuchsia pinks, lemon yellows, sunset oranges; it was as if they had been painted against the blobby green marsh of the estuary. Above it all loomed the wood, dark and impenetrable, and heavy clouds lying across the trees, though it did not rain.

The air was fresh; I combed it through my fingers.

Down the narrow alley, past the bright blue house and imagining leaping from bench to bench. The tide was out and mudbanks lay exposed like naked shins.

Torpedo sounds; birds breaking the water and diving underneath for fish maybe.

Staying to watch, I saw the sound was actually formed by slabs of sand dropping into the water.

I felt my energy ebb as I considered this happening every day. The tide washes in and smoothes the sand like silk. It drains and the sandbanks are perfect, vast wedges of caramel chocolate. Over the rest of the day, the sand falls into the water, kilo by kilo. Birds pick around it curiously, startled when a block drops. At the end of the day, the whole process starts again. The pointlessness of it, and its scale, made me queasy.

More wedding guests processed. Most were smartly dressed but some were raffish. Top hats and tails found in mouldering attics; long coats with buttons on the back; thick tweeds and heavy fabrics that we don’t make nowadays, and even then the inhabitants seemed out of place, moving slowly, pretending to be in a film. Some in bowler hats, flexing the wings of their long coats like cormorants. In my jeans and t-shirt I worried if I would fit in.

Bells rang. I sat outside the chapel and the wild flowers nodded, confirming their approval in the wind. They did not find just cause or impediment, and expressed a leaf-shrugging acceptance that you can do what you like, if you’re not troubling anyone else. I liked their philosophy.

Robert emerged from the chapel and put his arms round me. I turned but he put a finger over his lips. I’ve crept out, he said, I don’t do churches. We walked back into town.

The streets were empty. We ate our own sandwiches in the pub and stole the wine glasses when we had finished. Come on, he said. Richard, not Robert. We sat by the castle and watched the waves lapping the edge of the car park. The tide comes in quickly, the path floods at neap tides, he said. The posts marking the lane where cars could pass were half-submerged.

The reception was in a pink Georgian house by the river. It’s very impressive, I said as we went in, feeling like an impostor.

Yes it is, an old man with a gigantic moustache declared, leaping from behind a pot plant. The houses aren’t Welsh, he told me, as if convinced I was about to [ 78 ]

argue with him. No, no, no, they aren’t Welsh. This town isn’t Welsh, he concluded victoriously. I looked confusedly towards Robert for help but he shrugged. It’s in the depths of west Wales, I thought, how can it not be Welsh?

As if guessing what I was thinking, moustache man squared up in front of me.

It’s surrounded by Wales, but it isn’t Wales.

Okay, I said nervously. First law of journalism, agree with whatever the other person is saying.

We have our own Parliament. Like the Isle of Man. Really?

The Portreeve runs this town, I’ll introduce you if you like. We set our own rules. Nothing to do with anyone else. It’s pretty remote, he said, leaning into me and revealing some cracked, blackish teeth. His moustache twitched. Don’t often get people up from London.

I’m not from — And if we do, they don’t do well.

We don’t want to be late, said Robert, taking my arm and leading me gently away. Don’t mind him.

Cake. Some miniature houses, perfect as models, made of iced sugar and planted in paper cups. I was given a glass of champagne and welcomed enthusiastically.

The wine made me dizzy and the welcome seemed unreal. Dancing couples.

Music travelled along wires and through speakers planted in unlikely places. A child under a table, in an enormous white silk skirt which ballooned up in front of her. A smaller child crawled out from beneath it. A marble statue in the corner; a woman with no top on. One of the boys, about nine he was, stood behind it and snaked a hand up and cupped a breast. The statue ignored him poshly, a glazed look on her face.

I was introduced to a relative but had yet to see the bride or groom amongst the bustle. Adam, he said, shaking my hand briskly. There were small black hairs gnawing their way over his hands, over the knuckles. He had very square, very white fingernails. First law of journalism: notice the details. He looked at a picture of Dylan on the wall, young and uncertain, mouth slightly open. Terrible man, he said. The way he treated his wife. Women left right and centre. And Caitlin at home, bringing up three children, and not a bean to live on, because he drank every penny.

Why is he so famous, I asked. Adam looked at me as if I’d asked why his trousers had two legs. I mean, poets don’t become famous, I continued. Pop stars, yes, but not poets. Yet everyone here seems to know who he is – was, he’s been dead sixty years. [ 79 ]

He was a visionary, said Adam, glancing at the picture and Dylan raised his eyebrows in mute recognition. He was like Blake; you know Blake?

I shook my head.

Don’t know what they teach kids these days.

They teach us skills, I said. Useful things, for the real world.

Oh, that.

Dylan’s portrait nodded to Adam, encouraged him to continue, fill the void. He saw through things, Adam said. He saw what was underneath.

I heard he was a sex-mad alcoholic, I replied, just to provoke. First law of journalism, generate an interesting answer.

Adam shrugged. He was a writer, of course he was a sex-mad alcoholic.

Underneath, I wondered. What is underneath?

But Adam was off, as a waiter gleamed past with a tray full of shining glasses, the wine green and sparkly, and I never found him to get my answer.

Tight t-shirt, he said, I can see your breasts. I breathed and said nothing. Slimhipped, he said, pink jeans like rosehips. I watched, waited for more. She laps it up, she licks words like swallows. As he spoke birds swooped past. I think, I said, that I would like to walk down to the water with you. He nodded seriously, put a hand out and I took it.

The river flooded, the water swirling in and around the bridge. You could see it rise as you watched. It lapped at the stone, it climbed up the poles like ivy. The wheels of cars in the car park were already submerged. They won’t float away, Robert said. There may be a little tide damage in the morning, that’s all.

Towards the end of the party young men lolled like dozing dogs. In the morning the wreckage of them will still be there, Robert told me. He led me through a small door and we were in the garden. It was night; I hadn’t realised. The castle hovered above us, black against the purple sky, jagged.

Do you want to go in, he asked.

I looked at him oddly. This is a strange town I know, but not one where the castles are open at midnight.

He grinned. We have a gate, a secret entrance. He fumbled with the key, turning it this way and that. There was a moon, but it was behind the castle and its diagonals did not fall on the doorway. Eventually we were through. I stumbled [ 80 ]

but he knew the way and guided me. We sat in a crook of stone, hollowed out in ways that were familiar to him, so he could nestle his back into the right shape and I, tucked up next to him, was uncomfortable. He took his jacket off and rolled it to create a cushion.

Far below, the estuary snaked, a black slick, to the edge of the stone. The flood surrounded us now on three sides. The benches were submerged and nothing could be seen of the stone bridge. The car park was wet to the gate and one car remained in the centre: a Mercedes, its logo proud on its bonnet like a CND symbol, wheels underwater.

I stayed Richard’s hand as it reached into the hem of my jeans; three buttons down, two to go. He moved closer. Too cold, he asked? Shall we go to my room?

I woke before him and returned to the castle. Five o’clock and no one is up but the light is strong and the day marches. The older you get, the less you sleep. I know you know that, but it’s what old people say, so I’m saying it. It keeps you awake.

The clot in the leg or the brain can carry you off in a moment: awareness of this means that when you come to consciousness early in the day, you get up.

Through the gatehouse, and the familiar shudder when you enter an ancient place. How many people have walked these exact steps and seen these exact things, over so many centuries. Before electricity, nylon, radio, saxophones, threepronged forks, plastic, elastic, railway timetables, Saturn’s discovery, penicillin, aeroplanes, branded goods and chocolate, piano keys and mirrors, people touched these stones and contemplated this estuary.

I stood at the top and looked down on the glistening water and did not see the signs that said, do not climb up here, it is dangerous.

There was a summerhouse: a round mussel stuck to the side of the stone where Dylan wrote stories and Richard Hughes wrote A High Wind in Jamaica.

Now I am old and interested, I read somewhere that Hughes owned Seaview and let Dylan live in it; Dylan never had the money for a house. The first he borrowed, the second he was given. But it’s Dylan’s name on a plaque outside the grand yellow Georgian exterior where I’m staying. The ghost of Richard Hughes might be pretty annoyed, should he come walking up the street and see what the house looks like now.

The young me was interested in none of this, she was walking along the stone balustrade and seeing gulls fight and spat with each other along the ledges below.

I slipped off the wall and knocked my head sharply against the stone: a ringing sensation that made me momentarily think, is this how I go, a blow to the head [ 81 ]

and an early death? Yet here I am now, 91 and remembering this; so we know I came to no harm.

Dylan, according to the long-suffering Caitlin, went out every single night of their marriage. Why did she stay with him? He earned no money, he womanised, he drank.

We don’t forgive him the women, although as I saw him heading towards me, brow lowered, fat cigarette shoved in his mouth like a spoon, I could understand it. Were I a lover, I would love him. Were I a wife, I would stay. He paused then continued towards me, curly hair high on a balding head, yellowy fingers.

Crossing the forecourt was the same man, older, fatter, face bloated.

On a stone, the same man scribbling in a notebook. By the entrance he argued with a woman. I watched all these versions of Dylan and tried to think of the killer question. First law of, always be ready with a question.

One in a bow tie said, never believe that you cannot change the past.

Another read a poem that I rather liked, but as he turned and read it differently, it sounded terrible.

The older one, although he cannot have been as old as he seemed, looked me up and down and said, be quick. Be quick.

Am I really 91 and remembering this, or is it actually the next morning and I’m in a hospital bed, dreaming that I’m old, because I’m disorientated? We’ll never know.

I looked across the stone walls and saw Robert in the garden, naked. He held a sheaf of papers and recited from them.

Dylan liked to sit with his arm on her neck, he said, his finger hooked in her bra. He dropped the page and read from another one. Bed me now, she said, come, bed me now, now.

He turned and walked towards the house, and did not see me.

A narrow dogleg road, hemmed with double-yellow lines, stitchings for a boot.

At a fence two gatekeeper butterflies bordered me, one with darker colouring.

Later, on the train I remembered this and looked it up on the iPad; it was actually the Saldany Moth. Sometimes it is out in the daytime, disguising itself as a gatekeeper. The Saldany Moth; I’d never heard of it before, although it sounds familiar. First law of, do your research diligently.

[ 82 ]

At the Boathouse I admired the vastness of the view and smallness of the rooms. There was an outside café, its terrace cleared of chairs and parasols because the flood had only just gone down.

It even floods here? an elderly lady asked as she picked over the crumbled cliff of her scones. Yes, replied the owner, also elderly. Two more elderly ladies sat at the tables, studying the sea. One more behind me, nodding slowly. It was amok with elderly ladies. I was in an elderlylady of elderly ladies.

I opened my book on Dylan and the old spine cracked.

Nothing in that is true. A bony, blue finger jabbed the pages.

Really? How do you know? First law of.

Because I knew him. She settled opposite me and winced at the hard wood.

Elderly ladies have pale blue eyes; they bore at you, waiting to peck you like a worm. When do old ladies become old? There is no age you can fix it at. (I know now, but I was thinking this then.)

He wasn’t the boozer everyone claims he was, she says, her voice surprisingly soft after you’ve had the eyes at you. He couldn’t afford booze, he never had any money.

I must have looked questioning because she continued. It wasn’t that he was drunk, it was that he couldn’t take his drink. Quite a different problem, of course.

So he appeared heavily drunk when he’d only had a few.

A vast pot of tea appeared. I wondered if it was somehow for both of us, but there was one cup, one saucer.

He liked living here because he could have a couple of drinks quietly in the pub – did you go to Browns? – I nodded – and watch the people going by, and write.

She pursed her lips and rattled the teapot. Old ladies like their tea strong.

I knew his wife too. They were kind, gentle people. It’s all been exaggerated.

Even the video they have on upstairs – she nodded to the house – has that line about the eighteen whiskies. It isn’t real.

I thought he … everyone says … well known that…

She sipped her tea between each part of the list.

He spoke fiction. Everything he said was made up.

I nodded. Be patient, let her talk.

Look at the letters, you soon see that. He spins yarns, he boasts, he invents personalities.

So … why did he die so young, if he wasn’t drinking that much?

One of her clones took the tray away. Would you like cake too, she asked. I shook my head. There was a ringing sensation that buzzed around my ears.

When he was in the States, he was ill. He was always ill. Pleurisy, asthma, bronchitis, you name it.

[ 83 ]

Dylan sits on the wall, swinging his little legs. I was a sickly child, he says, as he puffs on the stub of a cigarette.

The elderly lady examined the remains of her cake. A doctor there thought he was drunk. Sedated him. Gave him cortisone, and morphine. Together!

Dylan stands beside me, looking out to the estuary. He turns and glowers at me. And, he says, forehead a granite mountain, benzedrine. Benzedrine!

The old woman leant forward. Can you believe it?

I suppose… that’s what they did in those days.

By the end table, Dylan shakes his head and points at me. I follow him and we go through the low-beamed door, Dylan waddling ahead, me ducking to fit inside. Past the corridor is a white-walled room, pipes running at shoulder height, ancient electricity sockets like boles on branches. Dylan lies in a rickety bed, motionless, and as I stare at him a woman breaks away from two white-coated juniors, their horn-rimmed glasses jiggling comically on their heads. Rushes over to Dylan and glares at him.

Is the bloody man dead yet she says, before she’s bundled away again – or doesn’t say, because I’m not quite sure I heard her right. The more I think about it, the less sure I am that it’s what she said, but I can’t remember now to report differently. It’s all chaos and movement – photographers are there now, leaning over the railed balcony, flashlights illuminating Dylan’s face and making him alive, his lips and eyebrows twitching in the changing beams of light.

We wait for him to say something, pause dutifully to hear what he might come up with. We’ve done all we can, explains the doctor, his voice gravelly and American. As much as we possibly could.

He is a special patient, you can see the doctor thinking; we have taken far more care over him than we normally would. We thought of everything we could and gave it to him, because the eyes of the world’s press are on us; what would it say if we were accused of neglecting him?

I’m pushed out along with the other journalists and glimpse Caitlin’s face, the disbelief, the wail of certainty. Outside the calm of the estuary washed over me.

The elderly lady was demolishing the last of her cake. For some reason, she said, this doctor decided to massively overdo it.

I see.

That’s what sent him into the coma.

So how, why…? How could they make a mistake like that?

She looked this way and that, over my head to a temporary logjam of elderly ladies, back to the cottage, and down to the doghouse. The blue eyes bored in all kinds of directions then homed back in on me. Well, who knows. I don’t want to invent things after the event. Possibly, he was an undiagnosed diabetic. That would explain a lot. Anyway. One way or the other, all the wrong stuff to give him.

[ 84 ]

I touched the back of my head, where a bruise had formed.

It would be wrong to use the word murder, she said, touching the tips of her teeth as if they might crack and shatter at any moment. ?

That’s the kind of word journalists would use.

Uh-huh…

But I would use the word manslaughter. Yes. The Manslaughter of Dylan Thomas. Would that be a good title for a story? She drained her tea and grimaced, a brown skull in the making.

Probably not, she concluded, in this day and age.

I suppose it makes sense. Even if he was knocking them back at an extreme rate, you don’t fall into a coma and die at 39. What the old woman said about the doctor has more of the ring of truth about it.

First law of, question everything. We read something and we take it as fact.

Why would we not?

The story about the local scandal, for which I was paid and which was printed, is long forgotten. And with Dylan, what I found by talking to people was inconsistent, unverifiable, not reported – so less real.

Nowadays, whenever I say the word ‘net’ and the screen lights up, it makes me dizzy. The information, the text. The stream of it, the endless content. It is real because it is written down.

So that’s my version. The official version is still what it says on Wikipedia – look it up. After you’ve read this, you may go there and update it and things will be different. Or, they might have been re-updated back to where they were before. Truths get rounded up to tell a story.

Anyway, we like our heroes dramatic and exciting. We want our stories neat and strong like those eighteen whiskies, and we want to know the beginning and the end. Our icons die young and stay compelling, they do not go gently into old age and wear a cardigan.

There was no train station, but I did see a stream, its sides deep and narrow, and in front of it a terrace with names like Cutting House and Rail Cottage.

Perhaps this was the ghost of the train line, that once connected Carmarthen to Laugharne and opened the town up to the Georgians, who built their proud, colourful houses here. Now it’s remote again, as it was centuries before, before it was Welsh.

It is a republic and it has its own currency. [ 85 ]

Probably time I ate something.

I walk into a pub and sit down, and someone asks me if I’m all right. There is no menu. I say I’ll have whatever they’ve got.

Notes. I am 93 today, or is it 92. Richard Hughes did not live in Seaview. There is no such thing as the Saldany Moth.

[ 86 ]

Three Villanelles Grant Tarbard

These poems are based on Dylan Thomas’ Ministry of Information films. I had a DVD of each of the released short propaganda films, nine in all, and the content of each poem is based on what was going on in the script and in the visual representation/propagandic value of each, whether it be a barrage balloon, or a new town development (the new town short seemed quite quaint, considering what has happened to the new towns now. I think of John Betjeman and his love of the Metropolitan Line and how the new towns, like Basildon to the east, have had their vision corrupted by big business, and, as you know, a new town was supposed to be a mix of local shops, local business and green spaces).


Aeons Green Mountain, Black Mountain, script by Dylan Thomas - a Ministry of Information film As the bulging haversack furnace hissed Intoning a lucent thread of deep tales, Black of the mountain, gone, into the mist.

In slum and back alley the nail boots twist, Gravestones rain soaked in wild flower bales, As the bulging haversack furnace hissed.

Penny bread and a blackberry stained wrist, Barnacled pipes blow smoke rings in grey hails, Black of the mountain, gone, into the mist.

[ 87 ]

Chimneys in meadows nourished with bone-grist, Dyed-in-the-wool ghosts in butt-end black trails, As the bulging haversack furnace hissed.

Green of the robed mountain sewn with a fist Of the turned up collars rope-morning veils, Black of the mountain, gone, into the mist.

Effigies of aeons old soil exist In the hard nosed embers that billow sails, As the bulging haversack furnace hissed, Black of the mountain, gone, into the mist.

[ 88 ]

Up She Goes Balloon Site 568, script by Dylan Thomas and Ivan Moffatt - a Ministry of Information film

The housemaid’s clock chimes “keep the planes high.”

From the factories and cities soft soap Into the broken ceramic blue sky.

In the boot deep milk of snow that weeps: “Cry To the winch, patriots! Gloves to the rope!”

The housemaid’s clock chimes “keep the planes high.”

Bed your balloon in a coconut shy, Up alleys that are now blind and do mope Into the broken ceramic blue sky.

Hangars like mouths with balloons for tongues, dry Rubberised Egyptian cotton, mole taupe, The housemaid’s clock chimes “keep the planes high.”

The straight as a tape measure river’s dye Bleeds into factories, the hills elope Into the broken ceramic blue sky.

Sturdy, by yourselves in the country’s eye, In a town’s slumber bombs come in a lope, The housemaid’s clock chimes “keep the planes high” Into the broken ceramic blue sky.

[ 89 ]

The Butcher, the Baker and the Candlestick Maker These are the Men, devised and compiled by Alan Usbiston & Dylan Thomas a Ministry of Information film

The butcher of storms has an unsound grin, Bugle men heave within these brute amens, Your reward? Split bones within a goose skin.

The baker of wounds, that frost bitten tin, Baking the bread of drums of if’s and when’s, The butcher of storms has an unsound grin.

The candlestick maker converts to sin, Rubber hose men, spine greasy kill in glens, Your reward? Split bones within a goose skin.

The killers and the killed are meagre, thin, Knuckle duster men, all of you in pens, The butcher of storms has an unsound grin.

Wounded and the dead are strangers within Schools of horror, ordered by fattened hens, Your reward? Split bones within a goose skin.

In the agony of a bullet’s pin Prick, lain in purgatory’s grave, here wends The butcher of storms has an unsound grin, Your reward? Spilt bones within a goose skin.

[ 90 ]

Postcards of the Hanging Helen Philippa East

Here I am in my tied-up apron, pea-spoon at the ready. Now Lady bawls out, chips or boiled? and on comes the line. The canteen is big with shiny orange walls.

There are metal grills on the windows and the chair legs make for screechy. The trays slide past us, one by one, and we fill them up with the goodies of the day.

I am in charge of vegetables here. I was put on them as part of the programme.

Lady does the meat and potatoes, and Doors does desserts. We stand in a line: Lady, me and Doors.

It is part of a great experiment.

I work in the canteen every day. Dr Filth says routine is therapeutic. My namebadge says Iggyross Basco and the tea-towels are stencilled BEDLAM HOSP. Whenever there are peas left over, I put cold handfuls in my pockets to bait the mice that scrabble under my bed. It’s nothing really but I’m careful not to let Lady in on the act. Doors caught me once and hit my fingers with a skillet lid. Not long ago, I was bluesy in the Hospital. Something was missing, but no-one knew what. The nurses poked and prodded but all to no avail, and Dr Filth himself could hardly fathom where to look. But that was before, all by myself, I found the very thing.

Three weeks ago Tuesday we had treacle-pie-and-custard. Lady piled the chips on high and I was generous with my lunchtime greens. I was feeling very sprightly and even my tongue felt like talking. After the vegetables, I shuffled through the service-hatch and tugged out the cleaning trolley. Clatter-bang I went up the tables, clearing the dishes plate-by-saucer. I stacked the bowls in wobbly towers and put the dirty spoons in their rightful places.

All the way up the chairs were empty, until I reached the very last one.

And there she was.

Sitting by the wall, eating biscuits from a blue tin box. Bushy brown hair was curled on her head; her shoulders were round, her legs were thick and her hands were red. She was not a beautiful woman, but then I am not a handsome man. I

[ 91 ]

pretended to clean a splotch on the wall but I only had eyes for her. The way she sat with her tin I couldn’t help moaning as I rubbed and scrubbed that lovely spot. Her smell stood out to me straight away: the smell of OUTSIDE - what a ticket! Oh but it was hard. The shakies caught my leg and twitching got the better of me. In the end I could but circle about at a distance.

But I didn’t give up. That night I named her The Woman and wrote her my first letter.

On Wednesday morning, the kitchen needed scouring. Doors pushed me under the benches and I scraped the dirt out in my palms. Afterwards Lady said: ‘Have you seen what they’re selling in the Hospital Shop? Lunatics on postcards, I tell you. Let that be a lesson.’

Lady watches over me. She didn’t wish to at first, but Dr Filth soon brought her round. I’m scared of Lady, but I don’t show it. Every week she files a report on my progress: I am getting good at ladling the spinach, it says, and I handle the broccoli-tongs well.

Dr Filth says the reports are most satisfactory. What a case I shall make!

After Wednesday lunch, Lady stamped my get-away card and off I went round the grounds. The nurses say fresh air is wholesome, and I wanted to see the postcards. There were big tall trees and spiky grasses in the flowerbeds, but if you looked through the leaves you’d see the wire fences that keep us inside. I used to skedaddle and haul at the meshes. But now I keep nicely to the concrete paths.

As I crossed the frog-pond, a squirrel came flipping towards me; I bared my teeth – HAARGH! - and it skittered away. Perhaps it remembered what happened to its friend. Further round came the Shop. Lady was right about the postcards. Brown and yellow, oh what a freakshow! Bedlam, 1893.

Here was a smart fellow who looked just like me: the lantern jaw, the goggle eyes.

You could see him sitting, posing nicely, but underneath it’d all gone to pieces.

Plink plink plink, his marbles bounced away. He‘d had no experiments, I feared. It was a bad old asylum in those days, but not anymore. Dr Filth saw to that. They cut away part of my brain, and in return I got paper and pencils, my own clothes, and a chest of drawers.

I bought the picture and put it carefully in my book, then up in my room I wrote another letter to The Woman. I told her about the postcard, pointing out the resemblances to myself. But How Times Have Changed, I wrote in big.

I put this letter in my pillow case with the other.

The Woman came again next Thursday, with her blue tin box and chair there in the corner. I espied she was a cleaner – excuse me, a DOMESTIC; I could tell it in her purple smock. I ran to the laundry room to find my smartest apron; Doors flung washing powder at me, but I didn’t care. When the moment came, I rushed [ 92 ]

out with my tea-towel and danced up-down near her table. This time I was smiling, and lo and behold she LOOKED UP. She did, she did, she did. I clacked my teeth with joy and swung my limbs in happy spirals.

Wasn’t that good progress?

Back in the serving line, my cheeks they burned like hotplates. Lady looked me head-to-toe as she stirred the onion soup.

‘What would your Mama think?’ she said.

Well. Mama was removed from me when I was very small. I took it hard, for every child needs a mother. Thereafter something was wrong in my head. I could not bear the sunshine and I sat in the corners of the yard. OH MAMA! The other boys grew scared and left me alone. Yes, I was wild back then. Then in and out I went but no-one knew what to do with me. Soft in the head like a soft-boiled egg. Dr Filth once said I would never be normal, and it made me so cross I bit the nurse.

But that was before the experiments. I’m much better with people since then.

Dr Filth likes to experiment. He is an experimental kind of person.

‘And you, Stanky,’ he said, ‘Are my most exciting experiment to date.’

Dr Filth is writing a paper on me. Last Sunday he wanted a photograph. He made me stand against the wall, sideways to show the scars on my head. But my back sloped and he didn’t like my elbows. I tried all over to straighten out, but I only went more crooked. In the end they lifted me on the neck clamp. That made me stand up alright. Then the camera went clickety-click and my own postcard was made. The nurses buzzed round like little bees, and Dr Filth agreed to show me when the article got printed.

That night I dreamed of The Woman and me. We sat by a river and night birds were a-singing. We held hands and she did not mind the twitching in my arms.

She smelled of roses, daffodils and sticky burrs. We lay on the wet grass and stared at the stars, never caring if bugs might crawl into our hair. We were free to come and go as we pleased, and I knew we would live HAPPILY EVER AFTER. Next day I ladled my peas with extra vigour. Lady watched me closely. Then she told a story.

‘Once upon a time,’ she said, ‘a patient did a Thing that made the Doctor very angry. As punishment, they fed him a chemical that made his breasts grow large and his penis shrivel up.’

I gripped my serving spoon and turned my face to the ceiling. What was she trying to tell me?

‘Pleasey-please!’ I whispered all to myself, ‘I am not normal yet but I am getting better! See how I thrive in the serving line, though I burn up in Doors’ hatred and am so scared of Lady!’

For what was the alternative? Barbitals and the brain-fry machine! Oh, I never wanted to go back there. [ 93 ]

See I knew the experiment was working, and I was right. On Friday I sat down at The Woman’s table with a hot, dry panting in my breath. I couldn’t speak a word of my heart, and her mouth was full of butterbeans. But I felt the electricals between us.

And afterwards, I followed her: hushly, hushly, big knees up, I tiptoed all the way to the cloakroom where she kept her brooms and brushes. She spotted me as she came out again and hopped with surprise. She watched me with round brown eyes in her white, white face, and did not move a muscle. I pinned myself to the wall, but I couldn’t help what was happening IN MY TROUSERS. She stared and stared while I slid myself away along the banisters, looking back at her all the time.

Then I didn’t see her for four long days. But tomorrow, I said, I will wait for her in the little broom cupboard. I will give her my letters and the postcard and the book, and tell her how I am part of a great experiment! She will read them all one by one, and when she has finished she will clasp my hand. Then we will lie down amongst the buckets, like lovely mermaids in the sea, in the flowers, in the waves.

I will ask her to take me away from here, away from the Hospital. And loving me as I love her, together with The Woman I will be sane at last.

Oh! But it did not happen that way, not at all, not at all, not at all!

There was no room in the cupboard and my panting was too loud for her. She cried I was crushing her against the brushes and mops, and I stroked at her head, but my hands caught her hair and pulled at her scalp. A-banging and a-crying were all the noises we made.

And then oh no, oh no, the light came flooding in and there stood Lady, and Doors behind. Oh, my terror was great then, for I could feel their fury in my veins! They grabbed me by the hair and hit me with my own belt. The Woman stood watching with her face in her fingers while they dragged me away from her, away away to the tall white office of Dr Filth. Dr Filth, who experimented so hard to make me sane and good; Dr Filth who is writing a paper to make me famous; Dr Filth who wires the brain-fry machine and who once held the ice-pick under my nose.

Now I sit here waiting for him to come, twitching in fear with only my book for company. The bed is clean and the nurse with the needle stands just outside the door. I’m writing fast-fast before they wheel me away, filling these pages with all the marbles of my mind.

For, very soon, I’ll take part in a brand new experiment.

And Dr Filth says, it’s the best one yet.

[ 94 ]

Childhoods David Urwin

“I ran away, because I wanted to be missed, because that would mean I was loved” Lemn Sissay “Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means/ Time held me green and dying/ Though I sang in my chains like the sea” Dylan Thomas Can you remember way back, Way back to that honeyed age Of long, hot, hazy summers, Lolling by that lazy river, Fishing with a friend and messing about in boats Like some Mole and Ratty, As the sun burned down sticky sweet?

Can you remember that far back, When all was loose and languid, When all our days were liquid gold And our legs were walnut brown, Our fingers thorn-pricked, our arms briar-scratched, Our tongues purple, our knees scabbed with adventure; And our aproned mother, apple-cheeked and flour-dusted, Our Mrs.Bun the baker’s wife, Fed us sweet apple pie and hot bread, Crust-kissed and kitchen-blessed, Into which golden butter melted Like syrupy sunlight?

[ 95 ]

Can you remember? Nor me.

The children’s home did not nestle by some Huck-Finn river, Log-cabinned and camp-fired.

It backed onto the Ship Canal, Gobbed with pink-sudded factory foam, The air sweating the stench of the chemicals plant, The streets rank with the reek of boiled cabbage.

I was not knee-scabbed But body-bruised and welted By my father’s brutal belt, My childhood a cage, My adventure to run away, To escape from it and adult rage.

I was no prince of the apple towns, My fruit was all tart, And time held me crying in the prison of his screams.

But now, now I am singing, now I am singing.

How I am singing!

[ 96 ]

Three Poems Martin Willitts

Daffodils

Daffodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus) A daffodil bud is seen among the snow, offering forgiveness. Winter was harsh, and the brutality of summer is not far away.

We need forgiveness. Surely, after tribulations there is relief. Already we are gardening dreams.

It had been huddling like an old gray woman grabbing her shawl, in an underground house, stirring a promise to return.

Soon its six petals’harmonic sense will bring love.

All day, it radiates. Although it has not grown, you can feel the end of winter, like curtains rustling.

It appeared in the Garden of Gethsemane as relief, and felt what would happen next. It was also there for the Roman soldiers who bit its bulb to ease their wounds, knowing what would happen next.

Now it’s here for us, and we do not know what will happen.

We only see so far, and things go pass faster. Tolerance is easier as we become older, and suffering becomes normal as our bodies find new ailments. In our dreams we plant.

We are yellow petals caught in a frayed shawl.

[ 97 ]

In a world uncertain what will happen next, there are some things we can expect and some we can’t.

The snow understands it cannot stand in the daffodils’way.

Two Poems from the sequence: Dylan Thomas’ Writer’s Desk, Replica, at the Dylan Thomas Museum 1. Oil Lamp, Left Corner, Near the Window The day smells of whale oil, smoky and turned down like letters accumulating light. When the day ends, make a new miniature sun, sprinkle its light from a watering can, wavering with elbow movement.

And shall it be said, we could be our own God controlling amount of radiance? Or shall it be said we can be our own wet nurses, arms of towels, running about, snipping sunlight into umbilical cords?

Or can it be said we could be our own roosters, all fleshy red combs like sundown, raising our own ruckus, trumpet and messenger and mailman with good news?

Or can it be said we can be our own parsons, thumbing tides for catching our own fish, big as marlins?

We’d have enough to feed a nation of carried immigrants, begging for a cross and communion and sparrows.

I am on fire, sheer tears of birds, trees of horizons, an alto saxophone, panting with open jets of light.

[ 98 ]

7. Looking Outside the Window Looking outside the window into the story of the sea, where did we go, you and me?

If I walked outside the turning of the leaves, and if I stepped across the sea, would your arms still find me?

And if the sea should go empty as a begging bowl, would you still feed me with apples peeled in a red bowl that I could offer one to the man starving on the street just below.

I could lie in your arms all night, and the world would not care.

The cherry blossoms will simply fill the air.

I am light in your arms.

You can’t feel me.

You carry me inside you, as a secret yellow stone.

I walk and part darkness, removing rose thorns.

I sneak past windows subtle as a storm.

[ 99 ]

You hardly notice me.

I am the one who sings as the night, searching for answers in the absence of light.

I can never in all this lonely world strike a match this bitter cold.

Find a picture of water, I’d turn it into sand, passing through your fingers into wind.

[ 100 ]

States: a view from the left coast Tony Kendrew

Taking Woody for Granite 300,000 March in New York City Against Global Warming. Not bad for a US crowd. It’s hard to get people off their butts these days. They can watch it on their iPhones. Like it on Facebook. Not that they believe marching will achieve anything.

It’s been a long time since Americans believed they had any influence on their government. We the People is dead. Now they pump gas and watch their country slide into mediocrity, mumbling complaints that no one will hear. The flap flap flap of the flat tire on the potholed road they can’t afford to fix. Drive into town for the mail. Home delivery long forgotten. And hurry, the Post Office closes at two now. No energy for rage, except the occasional gunshot fired through the window at a passing deer. Protest? Against what? The whole shebang? God knows what would happen if that came down. Better not think about it.

It was so easy in the 60s. There was the bomb and civil rights. There was Bob Dylan. He said it for us. He has his finger on the pulse of our generation - Allen Ginsberg. Why can’t he do it any more? Perhaps he’s given up too. Anyone desperate enough to take the born again option has to need a simple answer pretty bad. And it’s hard to find simple answers now. Still, you’d expect better from Bob Dylan. You’d expect someone who can command thirty-something fulllength eulogies while still alive (Is this a record?) would have something to say about the present catastrophe. An opinion, at least.

[ 101 ]

Maybe that’s his strength. His reluctance to hold an opinion. Bob Dylan never claimed he was protesting. Just singing his songs. Love songs. His friends thought him politically naïve. Wants to sing like Woody Guthrie! Get up and sing songs about the people and the land. So old hat! Been there, done that. We, on the other hand, have opinions about everything. Shove the microphone in our face for the latest: product, celebrity, disaster, political stalemate. A marketing trap we fall into willingly, to the delight of those who profit from the news or the party or the icon’s fame. So happy to be on camera, say who we are, where we stand.

Integrity! That’s a word you often hear about Bob Dylan. Refuses to agree with the interviewer. Refuses to please his fans with the same old stuff. Always creating, new. And it doesn’t matter if some of his material is weird, his presentation in need of polish. Integrity’s the main thing. With now and then a glitter in the pan.

How many of Dylan’s song lyrics would find a place as poetry in this journal? But that’s not the point. They’re great songs, not great poetry. There’s a difference between a song (words, music, voice) and a poem (words).

The other Dylan used to add performance to his poetry too, added voice to his words: Dylan Thomas, also a great performer. But great in a different sense.

Great like Caruso was great. The voice, the delivery. When I first heard The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan I wondered how he could get away with it. He wasn’t even trying. And it’s only gotten worse over the years.

Only humans cry. 90% cry to music, 60% to poetry, 5% to painting. So (you do the math, as we say over here), BD has a clear advantage over DT. He checks (ticks) all the boxes. He plays guitar and harmonica, his songs are analyzed ad nauseam for their poetic content, and his paintings were exhibited this summer in a New York gallery. Doesn’t that sound like a renaissance man?

Of course crying’s not the only, or even a reliable, measure of desirability, let alone quality. Do you cry to Bob Dylan? No? Which poets and poems make you cry? Not many by Dylan Thomas. Do not go gentle, perhaps. Now, as I was young and easy under the apple boughs. Gorgeous stuff, but no cigar.

What then, apart from their names, brings the two Dylans together for this issue of The Lampeter Review? Both were huge influences in their respective fields.

But while everyone has heard of Bob Dylan, only you and I have heard of Dylan Thomas. So what else is there about them? [ 102 ]

Both have a genius for words, use words in ways they have never been used before, and are confident enough to be unapologetic about it. Both are capable of writing average stuff, often a bedfellow of genius. Both can write embarrassing parodies of themselves. If you’ve read Dylan Thomas you may know some examples. How about: In the name of the lost who glory in/The swinish plains of carrion? For Bob Dylan, where do you start? Flipping through the hundreds of songs I found Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread, which opens with, Well, the comic book and me, just us, we caught the bus/The poor little chauffeur, though, she was back in bed/On the very next day, with a nose full of pus.

What else?

To my ears, Bob Dylan’s greatness is compromised by his American-ness - the prevalence in his songs of outlaws, death, the myth of hobos, trains, people who prefer to use a gun to settle their differences. This, too, is Woody Guthrie’s element, anchored in his country’s first uncivilized century, songs of sublimated anger. Don’t you long for America to grow up, to mature beyond the obsession with the law and the gun, to learn that a peaceful solution is different than drawing first? I am forever defending my chosen country against the smallness and prejudices of the land of my fathers, but of this one thing there is no defense.

And then, I find much of Woody Guthrie’s self-righteous sincerity nauseating – not at all excusable for being born of poverty.

Perhaps Woody Guthrie is a clue to the difference between the two Dylans. Did not the 19-year-old Bob Dylan search him out? Visit him in hospital? Find a clean way to protest without protesting too much? I don’t imagine Dylan Thomas ever heard of Woody Guthrie. Dylan Thomas was intensely interested in ordinary people, their lives and their foibles, spent all his spare time drinking and gossiping with them, but he wasn’t a historian and he wasn’t a campaigner or a complainer.

He was a reporter. Like Shakespeare.

Bob Dylan is a pretty serious dude. Way too serious for me. Quick count of 400 online photos of BD finds him smiling in 25. You have to go back to Nashville Skyline to see him smiling on an album cover. (Perhaps Johnny Cash told him to lighten up.) We may sing along, but we do not laugh along, with Bob Dylan.

Or even smile. Woody was pretty serious too. Check out his guitar. This machine kills fascists! Now, there’s something to share with the kids!

We’re a long way from Polly Garter.

[ 103 ]

But it’s also tough to find much to smile about in Dylan Thomas’s poetry, though we know he liked a laugh because of his prose. The Outing. What’s Bob Dylan’s prose like? Witty, says the blurb for Chronicles. Witty, not funny.

(An insert here to acknowledge the long tradition of poets who write poems of protest, rightfully angry, not usually funny.)

The most scholarly book about Bob Dylan is Christopher Ricks’ Dylan’s Visions of Sin. Well, there it is, isn’t it? Right there! That title! And that cover! Black with words in diabolical red. Sin! Can’t we move beyond that word? Isn’t this the 21st century? Ricks’ grouping of BD’s songs under the headings of The Sins, The Virtues and The Heavenly Graces may be a cute exercise, but it reinforces the idea that Bob Dylan’s work is obsessed with the past and the lessons of history, colored by ancient rituals of guilt and retribution. Not much there to take us forward, stretch our minds and belief systems, help us deal with today’s issues.

It’s back to sin and the whole Christianity thing! Hard to forgive Bob Dylan for converting to Christianity. (And, for much the same reason, T.S. Eliot for converting to Anglicanism.)

Professor Ricks brings his eloquent glass to bear on Bob Dylan’s lyrics with amazing results. But if he’d been so inclined I think he could have come up with an equally astonishing analysis of the lyrics of many other songwriters, and made equally fanciful connections between them and the classics of western literature.

Earlier this year I went to the Swansea exhibit of Dylan Thomas’s early notebooks, on loan from the State University of New York at Buffalo to the Dylan Thomas Centre. I had no idea how young and how enthusiastically he started on the trajectory that would end his life in New York a mere twenty years later. At the age when I was scribbling the odd verse, trying on various rhymes for heart and yearn, he was filling notebooks, already deep into being a poet, making long lists of alternative words, fully aware of the importance of his decisions. Right there in that small low-lit room my doubts about Dylan Thomas ended. My snobby complaints about him going overboard with words, or not caring about those who don’t share his obsession with their sounds alone, who can’t be bothered to figure out what the damn thing means, was over.

So if I’m feeling nostalgic or misanthropic, or want to relive the simple glories of self-righteous protest, give me the brilliant ballads of Bob Dylan. I’ll reserve the perennially satisfying art of Dylan Thomas for warmth and celebration: A Child’s Christmas in Wales on a cold December evening; Poem in October for anyone’s [ 104 ]

birthday in any month; and for all occasions anywhere, with or without tears, the ecstatic colors and rhythms of Fern Hill.

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Missed you at Cwmdonkin Drive Katherine Stansfield

Today, Dylan, I came for a reading, found you out so left this poem, to say that I was there, was ready with my re-cit-ation voice, my pages all crumpled moist

and my hands ashake, today, Dylan, after I roared cursing round Swansea’s one-way system, my satnav helpless as a goose in a dishwasher

but I got there, Dylan – today, Dylan, had you forgotten? – up the hill to your green front door then up the stairs and down again, called your name

but found you out – today! Dylan, you didn’t catch my moment in the front room, the good room, as I hymned from the chaise-longue, eyeing the brass,

the rug, the spick-span fender. Today, Dylan, I sang my own song, my not quite all grown song – a seagull yarking at the dado rail – but I wanted you

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and your voice, today. Dylan, your strange notes wouldn’t chime with mine but still we could sing of waiting and thinking and the words that come

in the night and the morning and today, Dylan – these words, this song. I came to nose about, poke about, turn about in your house and your life

and I found this today, Dylan, while you were out.

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Contributors

Emma Baines Since completing an MA in Creative Writing at Trinity St David, Emma has been published in four anthologies of poetry including The Month Had 32 Days (Parthian, 2011), which she also co-edited. She is a regular contributor at Poems and Pints at the Queen’s Hotel, Carmarthen and travelled to Ireland as part of the CORACLE Literature Exchange programme and recently read at the first Dylan Thomas weekend in Laugharne. She has also published previously in The Lampeter Review, as well as Cambria Magazine and many local publications and a translation of work by Menna Elfyn in POEM magazine.

Mark Blayney won the Somerset Maugham Prize for Two Kinds of Silence.

Stories and poems in Agenda, The London Magazine, Poetry Wales and others. He is available for MCing and readings: please see www.markblayney.weebly.com

Helen Philippa East graduated from Oxford University with a BA in Psychology and Philosophy. She now works full-time as a Clinical Psychologist, but has returned in the last few years to her original creative passion. She writes about the mind (and its failings), society’s trends (and their extremes) and the tensions of relationships; her stories have recently been finding their way into print. She is a member of Lindum Scribes and lives in Lincolnshire with her husband and cat. www.lindumscribes.org

Dic Edwards was born in Cardiff. He studied at St David’s University College, Lampeter, Cardiff University and Aberystwyth University. He has written over 20 plays, including Franco’s Bastard, Utah Blue and The Pimp as well as the acclaimed poetry collection Walt Whitman and Other Poems. He also wrote the libretto for Keith Burstein’s controversial opera Manifest Destiny. In Feb-March 2009 his play Casanova Undone was produced at Kruttenden by That Theatre in Copenhagen. He wrote The Cloud Eater with Brazilian composer Mario Ferraro

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which was produced in London last May and was staged in a festival for young people’s opera in Rio de Janeiro in October. He is the founder and director of the Lampeter Creative Writing Centre at the University of Wales, Trinity St David. www.dic-edwards.com

Menna Elfyn is an award-winning poet and playwright who writes with passion of the Welsh language and identity. Author of over twenty books of poetry including Aderyn Bach Mewn Llaw (1990), winner of a Welsh Arts Council Prize; the bilingual Eucalyptus: Detholiad o Gerddi / Selected Poems 1978-1994. In 1999, she co-wrote ‘Garden of Light’, a choral symphony for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra which was performed at the Lincoln Centre in New York. She is a director of the MA in Creative Writing at Trinity Saint David. Her latest collection, Murmur, was published by Bloodaxe Books in October 2012.

Paul Geraghty, is a Bob Dylan fan living in the West of Ireland who is also now taking an interest in Dylan Thomas. An avid reader, a writer of prose and poetry, and a runner, he describes himself as an aspiring author and a perspiring athlete. He is an energetic promoter of literary and music events in his locality, and provides PR services to arts and business enterprises in Co. Mayo. paulgero@ gmail.com

John Goodby has taught at Leeds and Cork universities, and currently holds a Chair in English at the University of Swansea. He is the author of Irish Poetry Since 1950: From Stillness into History (2000), The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall (2013) and the editor of the new centenary edition of the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (2014). He was the winner of the Cardiff International Poetry Competition in 2006, and his most recent collections of poetry are Illennium (2010) and A True Prize (2012). With Lyndon Davies he was the co-organiser of the Hay Poetry Jamboree (2009-2012), and he edits the Boiled String poetry series, which specialises in publishing alternative Welsh poetry.

Philip Gross won the T.S.Eliot Prize 2009 and Wales Book of The Year 2010.

Recent collections Deep Field and Later dealt with his father’s final years and loss of language. A collaboration with artist Valerie Coffin Price, A Fold In The River, is due from Seren, and a new collection from Bloodaxe, Love Songs of Carbon, both in 2015. www.philipgross.co.uk

Jackie Hayden is the author of more than ten books. His latest is A Map of Love - Around Wales With Dylan Thomas, available as a hard-copy book from Fflach Records in Cardigan and as an e-book through Amazon. Fflach have also issued a [ 109 ]

CD of a related script written by Hayden and read by Jim Parc Nest in the room where Dylan was born in Swansea. Hayden also delivers a lecture entitled Dylan, Dylan and Me that traces his discovery of Dylan Thomas and Wales via his interest in The Beatles and Bob Dylan.

Suzanne Iuppa is a poet, community worker and filmmaker who lives in North Wales. She has worked previously as a countryside ranger in the Clwydian mountains. Her first published poetry series On Track: Poems from Welsh Pilgrimage (Alyn Books) was the subject of a North American reading tour in 2013.

Her current writing describes her journey to find sacred springs and holy wells of Wales, in their natural and mythical settings. She confesses to only loving bits of Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan, but significant others have been fanatics; leading to osmosis on the quiet.

Mike Jenkins lives in Merthyr Tudful. His latest book is Barkin! (Carreg Gwalch), poems and stories in Merthyr dialect, which was short-listed for the 2014 Roland Mathias Poetry Award. Question Island (Alun Books), a novel for teenagers, is due out this autumn. He is the co-founder and co-editor of Red Poets magazine and a regular blogger on his website www.mikejenkins.net.

Tony Kendrew lives and writes in a remote and beautiful part of Northern California, where he produced a CD of his poems called Beasts and Beloveds. His first collection of poetry, Feathers Scattered in the Wind, was published by Iconau in the spring of 2014. A second collection, Turning, also a CD, was submitted as his dissertation for the Creative Writing MA at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David in Lampeter. http://www.feathersscatteredinthewind.com

Guy Manning is an artist who lives and works in Pembrokeshire. He has had numerous exhibitions in the UK, France and New York and his work is held in private collections around the world.l

Jo Mazelis’ collection of stories Diving Girls (Parthian, 2002) was short-listed for Commonwealth Best First Book and Welsh Book of the Year. Her second book, Circle Games (Parthian, 2005) was long-listed for Welsh Book of the Year. Her novel Significance was published by Seren in September 2014. She lives in Swansea.

Kate Murray has recently completed her Masters in Creative Writing and is currently working as an illustrator and writer. Her first anthology of short stories The Phantom Horse was published in December 2013 and she subsequently has had another anthology published by Raging Aardvark; Kate has had short stories [ 110 ]

published in numerous magazines and e-zines, including The Lampeter Review, Jotter’s United, and What The Dickens. Kate’s artwork has been exhibited at the Museum Of Modern Art in Machynlleth and Aberglasney Gardens as part of the Mid Wales Art group. enquiries@katemurray.org.uk

Kevin O’Neill was born at the beginning of the ‘Big Snow’ of 1947 in Newport south Wales. He spent his youth in Cardiff where he attended Art college in the mid-sixties. After moving to London, he left Burberry’s design studio to work with his brother as a professional gambler during the 1970’s. In 1984 he moved to Ireland with his wife Pat and young family where he now lives and works near a small fishing village in Wexford. He can be contacted by e-mail for commissions at blake.oneill47@gmail.com

Rachel Simons is a Welsh poet who grew up in Swansea and lives in Cardiff with her girlfriend and their rabbit. By day she is a support worker in Cardiff’s largest homeless hostel.

Katherine Stansfield lives in Aberystwyth. Her first book of poems, Playing House, will be published by Seren in October 2014. Parthian published her debut novel The Visitor in 2013, which went on to win the 2014 Holyer an Gof prize for fiction. Website: http://katherinestansfield.blogspot.co.uk/ Twitter: @k_ stansfield

Grant Tarbard is currently chief editor at The Screech Owl. He has worked as a journalist, a contributor to magazines, a reviewer and an interviewer. His poetry can be seen in such magazines as The Rialto, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Bone Orchard Poetry, The Journal, Southlight, Sarasvati, Earth Love, Mood Swing, Puff Puff Prose Poetry & Prose, Postcards Poetry and Prose, Playerist 2, Lake City Lights, The Open Mouse, Miracle, Poetry Cornwall, I-70, South Florida Review, Zymbol and Decanto. He came first runner up at the age of sixteen in Ottakar’s National Poetry Competition with a poem entitled Delicacy and won The Poetry Box Dark & Horror Poetry Magazine’s Sinister Poetry Award May 2014.

Jacqui Thewless has poems published in Roundyhouse Poetry Magazine issue 40 (January 2014), on twitter(2nd prize in SwindonLink twitterpoetrycompetition, October 2013) and on PoemHunter . She lives in Pembroke, SW Wales. www. poemhunter.com/jacqui-thewless/

David Urwin grew up in Manchester, but lives a rural life in West Wales. He regularly reads his work in Cardigan (Cellar Bards) and in Carmarthen (Poems [ 111 ]

and Pints at the Queen’s). he also belongs to Penfro Poets, a group that meets at Rhosygilwen, an arts venue near Cardigan. He particularly enjoys the live reading of poetry and of other forms of writing.

Eloise Williams came to writing in the search for sanity after over a decade of working as an actress. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Swansea University and her first book Elen’s Island will be published by Firefly Press in Spring 2015.

You can find out more about Eloise at www.eloisewilliams.com

Martin Willitts Jr is a Quaker and organic gardener. He is a retired Librarian.

He won the Dylan Thomas International Poetry Award for his poem Daffodils based on the theme of Harmony. He has six full length collections including national ecological award winner Searching for What Is Not There (Hiraeth Press, 2013) and 28 chapbooks including national contest winner William Blake, Not Blessed Angel But Restless Man (Red Ochre Press, 2014)

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