Woven in with all the Death come many favorite poems.

Among them: Being But Men

And Death Shall Have no Dominion, Stanzas 1 and 3

We lying by seasand

That Sanity be Kept

FIVE STARS FOR Especially when the October Wind, Fern Hill,
A Winter's Tale, and Poem in October.

Thank you, Dylan Thomas, for these.

(My copy of Dylan Thomas SELECTED POEMS by Walford Davies, Phoenix,1974 could not be located - cover is beautiful.) ( )

Hardcover of this book is $3500.

Another poetry book I've not read cover-to-cover but have mined extensively. Thomas' poetry is so syllabic (to quote him) and so full of blarney and drunken verbosity that one can get bogged down with the quest for meaning. I prefer to read this as nearly incomprehensible hymns to living and nature that effect something powerful in the words and lines. ( )

Dylan Thomas was clearly a gifted and influential poet, with great technique and soul, and dying young certainly helped his reputation as a brooding master of the form. That said, few of the poems corralled into his Collected Poems are essential, outside of his most famous ones like 'And Death Shall Have No Dominion' or 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night'. In the extensive end-notes to this Phoenix edition, Thomas himself is quoted in a letter as acknowledging as one of his main faults "a very much overweighted imagery that leads too often to incoherence" (pg. 162) and, whilst this can read as the usual creative angst of a writer, it is the case that many of his poems are lyrical ciphers that need a lot of time to settle. The stark, lucidly simple 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night' is, unfortunately, not representative of his work, and a complete read of his Collected Poems does not identify any hidden challengers to it. ( )

Dylan says on the cover: "Contains most of the poems I have written, and all, up to the present that I wish to preserve."