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May 16, 2009

Ceridwen rated it:

I know I'm not supposed to find graffiti amusing, because then the barbarians are at the gates or have already won or the barn door is still open or something, but there's an enterprising graffiti person (graffiter?) in my neighborhood who likes to scrawl lines of poetry on the privacy fences, billboards and garage doors. One of my best mornings involves rolling down the alley and seeing “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” in letters that started big and got smaller all ove More...

31 comments like (23 people liked it)

Aug 21, 2011

Paul rated it:

I work in an office where we get a zillion phone calls from all over the world. About half of the time the callers have very broken English, and in a few cases they have no English so we get a translator by calling a translation service and conferencing them into the call. This one particular evening a female co-worker - we'll call her Sarah because it was Sarah - got this call from a guy who needed a translator. He was talking in Portuguese. So anyway, the translator introduces herself and Sara More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Feb 12, 2008

matt rated it:

Just a master of sheer language.

His poetry works on your inner consciousness, you feel it and hear it before you think it.

Untangling his syntax and his associations makes for some interesting reading all its own.

His name meant "wave", as in the ocean, in Welsh.

He said his three biggest influences were Yeats (I think), The Bible, and Freud.

Imagine this simmering stew, this cauldron if you will, and you've got yourself s More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jan 04, 2012

Christina Marie rated it:

Dylan Thomas is the unhappiest poet I've ever read. I've read poems about rape and incest that didn't make me feel this horrible.

"Do Not Go Gentle" is usually the way young people find Thomas, or at least people of my generation who walked around quoting the hot guy from the Michelle Pfeiffer flick, Dangerous Minds: "You've got to RAGE against the DYING of the LIGHT!" That dude dies because he doesn't knock on a door. Michelle Pfeiffer becomes the apple of the un More...

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Dec 05, 2011

Mason rated it:

Fiction, Updike once said, should be no more clearer than life. Thomas takes a similar approach to verse—each poem in this collection is wildly contradictory and ripe with paradoxical complexity. His best poems pure dark beauty; almost sensually ecstatic even in the face of the darkest sorrows, they give our tremors and terrors wings, and dare us to follow them into the deepest secrets of life itself. To read a Thomas poem is to see common experience frozen in the glowing amber of language; who More...

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Mar 31, 2010

Esther rated it:

I don't pretend to understand a lot of his work, but I love it. Anyone who can write things like -
-"they shall have stars at elbow and foot"
-"joy has moved within the inmost marrow of my heart bone"
-"at last the soul from its foul mousehole slunk pouting out"
-"Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart push in their tides" or
-"The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind."
not to mention his wonderful tr More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 30, 2009

Candace rated it:

When I was in my teens, I loved music of the Romantic period -- Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and such. I thrilled to the nocturnes of Chopin, that I would play alone in my room, by candlelight. I even, later on and very briefly, flirted with a few overbearing composers like Wagner. Yes, it was the lusty, passionate music I identified with. I disdained Baroque and early Classical music, which I insulted as "chamber pot pieces."

And my tastes in poetry, then ran to Dylan Thomas More...

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Jan 10, 2012

Mark rated it:

I used to write and read poetry in my younger days, and have had a desire to reconnect with that part of me during this year. Dylan Thomas has long been one of my favorites, and I thought I would begin this year with him.

Of course most people are familiar with "Do not go gentle into that good night" (If you are not, make it must read!!!!), and rightfully so. it is one of the most famous poems of all time and easily sits inside of my top 10 (Which might be filled with more P More...

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Jan 12, 2008

Paul rated it:

What can I say? Still my all-time favorite. Maddeningly dense and self-absorbed in places, but always a master of language and sound. The closer you look, the more you see just how carefully constructed the poems are, and how he pulls off complicated structures with disarming ease. Just hearing the poems out loud is a transcendent experience, and many of the best are available online in his voice.

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Oct 06, 2011

Elizabeth rated it:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang th More...

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Jan 01, 2010

R.Joseph rated it:

This collection has the great poems “Fern Hill” and “Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines”. This collection also holds one of my personal favorite poems of all times, the simple yet majestic “I Have Longed To Move Away”. This book is a great introduction to Thomas’s work.

1 comment like

Dec 05, 2007

Chrissie rated it:

Studied these poems at university and am in awe at Dylan's genius. I can't begin to claim I understand all of the poems in this work, but all of the ones I have looked at in depth are quite amazing as pieces of English that touch a nerve and stir your soul.

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Sep 27, 2007

Shannon rated it:

My favorites are IF I WERE TICKLED BY THE RUB OF LOVE & 146: POEM IN OCTOBER. I declare a favorite and then find another equally or surpassingly exquisite. Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas both do this to me! Damn, I love my Dylans!

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Sep 25, 2011

Julia rated it:

i read this at camp and i'm pretty sure i only rarely understood what thomas was even saying, possibly because i was using the wrong reading method for a poetry collection. my poetry teacher at camp said she never reads a book of poetry straight through, she flips to random pages and reads the poems in random order. i feel that this kind of reading method should be the case for dylan thomas.
but even if you're not quite sure what dylan thomas is saying you can still appreciate the sounds an More...

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Apr 11, 2009

Michael rated it:

That voice on recordings is so resonant, and without any technical gadgetry.

Very much a poet for adolescents, and whyever not!
This first poet I fell into; the first poetry book I ever bought (Deaths and Entrances, in a tiny bookshop in a shoddy little town).

How does he read to a grown-up (notice I didn'y write 'adult'! Too final a word for something that is more fuzzy)?
I would hate to do without Fern Hill, Poem on his Birthday (in fact, all his birthday poems More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 11, 2011

Nikki rated it:

What can one say about Dylan Thomas that has not been said? I suspect I start many of my reviews of classic books like that, but it's true -- I don't know where to start. Dylan Thomas' poetry is amazing, particularly the ones like 'Prologue', where the first line rhymes with the last, the second with the penultimate line, etc... and it's 102 lines long. I love the ones that work with content appropriate to the form, like the perennial example of his villanelle, 'Do not go gentle into that good n More...

4 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 01, 2012

Matt rated it:

I wrote this essay on Thomas's poetry for English class last year while we were covering modernist literature. It's pretty rough around the edges, but, I think, not without its charm. Hopefully you will find something for yourself in it.

Matt DeCostanza
Aiden O’Leary & Tom Ashby
American Literature
10 May 2011

Facade and Psychological Realism in the Work of Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas is a poet whose body of work is shot with obscurity More...

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Jun 29, 2011

Catherine added it

Always when he, in country heaven,
(Whom my heart hears),
Crosses the breast of the praising East, and kneels,
Humble in all his planets,
And weeps on the abasing hill,

Then in the delight and grove of beasts and birds
And the canonized valley
Where the dewfall stars sing grazing still
And the angels whirr like pheasants
More...

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Apr 30, 2011

James rated it:

My favorite is "Poem in October" but I love to read and reread them all. I guess it is the music that is alive in Thomas' poetry that makes it come alive for me. Here is an example:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honored among wagons I was prince of the apple towns,
An More...

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Apr 09, 2010

Pete rated it:

I don't do poetry. However, this collection is what I would wish to take to my desert island. Richard Burton took this book to his grave. I prefer the desert island idea. 'Do not go gentle into that good night' must be one of my favourite poems. But there are so many here. Monumental stuff. The bard of the 20th century. I went on pilgrimage to Laugharne to visit his house.
The collection I keep like a bible. I can take this down from the shelf and just open it at any page. It's remarkabl More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 11, 2008

Moody rated it:

I've been going back and forth on how to rate this one. I mean what can you do with two hundred poems. It's like this: Some cut deep, are dead on, all punch and polish; then there are those, maybe half, that are just words on paper, bounce off you like the local newscast. I've just realized...It seems I've forgotten my stupid notes. Which means that I'm left with my stupid memory.

I heard this discussion on NPR, someone said that poetry should be approached as music, where you More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 04, 2009

Erik rated it:

Cannabis was so prevalent by the end of high school and beginning of college, my need to belong so great, that I was a regular user on weekends. Eventually, however, having explored the action of the drug to the extent of taking enough hashish as to be unable to move, absorbed in drifting over brilliant kaleidoscopically checkered fields, I recognized that I wasn't learning anything new. Marihuana made me silly, made me hungry, made me sleepy, left me with a hangover the next day, a mild stupo More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Nov 01, 2008

Y. Jacintho rated it:

I have, for a long time, enjoyed listening to his recorded readings. Each time I listen to him, I know a lustier poet could not exist. His lust for experience—for the "Light (that) breaks where no sun shines" or the "rub of love"—comes across in the verve contained in his choice words and in the mechanism of his voice. Thomas owned the unusual gift of Being, within himself and within the pulse of other living things that would later become the inspiration for his work... His More...

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Apr 21, 2009

J rated it:

probably the first collection of poetry i ever read.

Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes.
(Bury the dead for fear that they walk to the grave in labour.)
In the groin of the natural doorway I crouched like a tailor
Sewing a shroud for a journey
By the light of the meat-eating sun.
Dressed to die, the sensual strut begin,
With my red veins full of money,
In the final direction of the elementary town
I advance for as long as forever is.

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Apr 12, 2009

Lawrence rated it:

Not that every poem Dylan wrote is a great one. No. But he hits maybe one out of four or five and that it exceptional. Other than Ray Bradbury, no writer has contributed more to my seeing of the world than did Thomas, no one tingled my ears more than did those rolling hyphenates and verb- and noun-fused constructs. Dark and playful all at once, that is Dylan.

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Jan 16, 2009

Brian rated it:

Dylan Thomas is an amazing poet. Apparently drank himself to death when he was about 35... thus proving that you don't have to die at 27 in order to die a tragic young death and be fantastically famous and talented. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night... Old Age Should Burn and Rave at Close of Day... Rage RAGE against the Dying of the light...

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Oct 10, 2011

Stef rated it:

Some of the most jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring, envy-inciting poems I've ever had the privilege of reading (and continuously rereading).

This collection is very tight - all of the works fit neatly together, and the lack of variation in poetic maturity throughout is once again mind-boggling. To think of the young age at which Thomas began writing is truly remarkable, and it's almost unbelievable how he retained his creative powers throughout his career.

If ever I am in doubt o More...

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Oct 21, 2010

Cassie rated it:

Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles
In children's circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books,
But time has set its maggot on their track.
Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
What's never known is safest in this life.
Under the skysigns they who have no arms
Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.

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Apr 08, 2011

uh8myzen rated it:

Dylan Thomas is a poet who loves the sound of words and whats more, can make even the cruelest things beautiful. He is a word-smith extrordinaire.

"Do not go gentle into that good night" is one of my all time favorites, as it reminds me so much of my father who raged against death always, until the end.

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Jan 31, 2009

Claire rated it:

Read Fern Hill. Also Poem in October:

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

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