The book attempts, for the first time, to demonstrate a vital connection between Thomas’s poetry and post-Freudian psychoanalysis. This will benefit readers by helping shed new and illuminating light on the writing and will help close the gap that sadly still exists between Thomas’s critical and popular receptions. Close textual analysis of poems that have to date received only scant critical attention e.g. ‘Today this insect’ The Notebooks have received only scant critical attention, and have been subordinated to a purely minor role. Here, however the Notebooks are re-visited and re-evaluated, because the text of these four manuscript exercise books, provides us with a highly significant and revealing document.
An accessible introduction to the life and work of the inventive Welsh poet. Dylan Thomas—author of some of the century’s greatest poetry, stories, and film scripts as well as one of the greatest radio features ever broadcast, Under Milk Wood—is often characterized as self-indulgent. This concise and up-to-date biography challenges this depiction with a fresh portrait of the artist as a consummate professional. John Goodby and Chris Wigginton locate the source of Thomas’s daring and inventive style in the poet’s Anglo-Welsh origins as well as his historical, cultural, and social contexts: the Great Depression and 1930s literary London, surrealism, World War II, and Cold War popular culture. The result is a revealing and fresh introduction to the life and work of this important Welsh writer.
Discovering Dylan Thomas is a companion to Dylan Thomas’s published and notebook poems. It includes hitherto-unseen material contained in the recently-discovered fifth notebook, alongside poems, drafts and critical material including summaries of the critical reception of individual poems. The introductory essay considers the task of editing and annotating Thomas, the reception of the Collected Poems and the state of the Dylan Thomas industry, and the nature of Thomas’s reading, ‘influences’, allusions and intertextuality. It is followed by supplementary poems, including juvenilia and the notebook poems ‘The Woman Speaks’, original versions of ‘Grief thief of time’ and ‘I fellowed sleep’, and ‘Jack of Christ’, all of which were omitted from the Collected Poems. These are followed by annotations beginning with a discussion of Thomas’s juvenilia, and the relationship between plagiarism and parody in his work; poem-by-poem entries offer glosses, new material from the fifth notebook, critical histories for each poem, and variants of poems such as ‘Holy Spring’ and ‘On a Wedding Anniversary’ (including a magnificent, previously unpublished first draft of ‘A Refusal to Mourn’). The closing appendices deal with text and publication details for the collections Thomas published in his lifetime, the provenance and contents of the fifth notebook, and errata for the hardback edition of the Collected Poems.
A collection of essays on Dylan Thomas, reading culture and his place in modernist studiesReclining quietly with a book; an ear glued to the Hi-Fi; sifting a library stack; the TV flickering; a website gone live Few poets have inspired such remarkable scenes and modes of interpretation as Dylan Thomas. Our means of access and response to his work have never been more eclectic, and this collection sheds new light on what it means to 'read' such a various art. In thinking beyond the parameters of life writing and lingering interpretative communities, Reading Dylan Thomas attends in detail to the problems and pleasures of deciphering Thomas in the twenty-first century, teasing out his debts and effects, tracing his influence on later artists, and suggesting ways to understand his own idiosyncratic reading practices. From short stories to memoirs, poems to broadcasts, letters to films, manuscripts to paintings, the material considered in this volume lays the ground for a new consideration of Thomas's formal versatility, and his distinctive relation to literary modernism. Key FeaturesEvaluates the breadth of Thomas's creative practice, from short stories to memoirs, poems to broadcasts, letters to films, manuscripts to paintingsDraws on recently discovered manuscripts and archival material in Britain and North AmericaA distinctive combination of cultural history, close reading, and critical theory
1. The book is in keeping with contemporary developments in literary criticism and interpretation. 2. The book is the first to offer a comprehensive critical overview of Thomas’s entire output. 3. It provides exciting new commentaries on cultural appropriations and interpretations of Thomas in the media, letters, and popular culture. 4. It contains work by some of the leading voices in the fields of Thomas studies and Welsh Writing in English. 5. It offers key insights into the Welsh contexts of Thomas’s work and legacy.
Between May 1930 and August 1935, Dylan Thomas kept numerous notebooks of poems. They contain the drafts of almost all of the work that would form his first two reputation-making collections, 18 Poems (1934) and Twenty-five Poems (1936), and many of those in his third collection, The Map of Love (1939). Thomas sold four of the notebooks, spanning May 1930 to May 1934, to the University of Buffalo in 1941. However, the existence of a fifth notebook, covering the period June 1934 to August 1935, was unknown until 2014, the centenary of his birth. The Fifth Notebook of Dylan Thomas makes this newly-discovered text available to readers and researchers for the first time. It contains the only existing MSS versions of Thomas's most challenging poems, 'I, in my intricate image' and 'Altarwise by owl-light', and fourteen other early poems. It contains facsimiles and full transcripts of the originals, is annotated throughout, and has a full scholarly introduction. Exploring the contexts of these brilliant and experimental lyrics – many with substantial reworkings and variant passages – this landmark publication sheds new light on the creative practice of one of the most important and well-known poets of the twentieth century.
The most complete and current edition of Dylan Thomas' collected poetry in a beautiful gift edition celebrating the centenary of his birth The reputation of Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century has not waned in the fifty years since his death. A Welshman with a passion for the English language, Thomas’s singular poetic voice has been admired and imitated, but never matched. This exciting, newly edited annotated edition offers a more complete and representative collection of Dylan Thomas’s poetic works than any previous edition. Edited by leading Dylan Thomas scholar John Goodby from the University of Swansea, The Poems of Dylan Thomas contains all the poems that appeared in Collected Poems 1934-1952, edited by Dylan Thomas himself, as well as poems from the 1930-1934 notebooks and poems from letters, amatory verses, occasional poems, the verse film script for “Our Country,” and poems that appear in his “radio play for voices,” Under Milk Wood. Showing the broad range of Dylan Thomas’s oeuvre as never before, this new edition places Thomas in the twenty-first century, with an up-to-date introduction by Goodby whose notes and annotations take a pluralistic approach.
This carefully curated collection of essays charts interactions between majority languages (including English, French, German, Italian and Japanese) and minority dialects or languages pushed to the margins (including Arabic, Bengali, Esperanto, Neapolitan and Welsh) through a series of case studies of leading modern and contemporary cultural producers. The contributors, who work and study across the globe, extend critical understanding of literary multilingualism to the subjects of migration and the exophonic, self-translation and the aesthetics of interlinguistic bricolage, language death and language perseveration, and power in linguistic hierarchies in (post-)colonial contexts. Their subjects include the authors Julia Alvarez, Elena Ferrante, Jonathan Franzen, Amélie Nothomb, Ali Smith, Yoko Tawada, and Dylan Thomas, the film-maker Ulrike Ottinger, and the anonymous performers of Griko. The volume will be of interest to students of creative writing, literature, translation, and sociolinguistics.
A volume of poetry in which the author confronts God, the perpetrators of the Holocaust, and the bystanders to the genocide in which six million Jews were murdered. Menachem Rosensaft also reflects on other genocides, physical separation during the COVID-19 pandemic, and why Black lives matter, among other themes that inspire the reader to make the ghosts of the past an integral part of their present and future. About the AuthorMenachem Z. Rosensaft is the associate executive vice president and general counsel of the World Jewish Congress and teaches about the law of genocide at Columbia Law School and Cornell Law School. In addition to a law degree from Columbia Law School and a master's degree in modern European history from Columbia University, he received a master's degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University. He is the editor of God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2015). ***Through his haunting poems, my friend Menachem Rosensaft transports us into the forbidding universe of the Holocaust. Without pathos and eschewing the maudlin clichés that have become far too commonplace, he conveys with simultaneous sensitivity and bluntness the absolute sense of loss, deep-rooted anger directed at God and at humankind, and often cynical realism. His penetrating words are rooted in the knowledge that much of the world has failed to internalize the lessons of the most far-reaching genocide in history. The son of two survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Menachem, brings us face to face with his five-and-a-half-year-old brother as he is separated from their mother and murdered in a Birkenau gas chamber. He then allows us to identify with the ghosts of other children who met the same tragic fate. Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen deserves a prominent place in Holocaust literature and belongs in the library of everyone who seeks to connect with what Elie Wiesel called the "kingdom of night." Ronald S. Lauder, President, World Jewish Congress. Ever since he was a college student and in the many decades since Menachem Rosensaft has been raising difficult questions. He has rarely if ever, turned away from a fight when truth and justice were at stake. That same honesty, conviction, and forthrightness are evident in these compelling poems. His passion about the horrors of genocide, prejudice, and hatred leaves the reader unsettled. And that is how it should be. Deborah Lipstadt, Ph.D., Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, Emory University. Menachem Rosensaft's luminous poetry confirms that he is not only one of the most fearless chroniclers of our factual, hard history, but also a treasured narrator of our emotional inheritance. Each of his poems is a jewel of economy, memory, and pathos, and each is a crystallized snapshot of the strained times we are living in, as well as the past moments we wish we could unlive. Share this collection with the people you care about. Abigail Pogrebin, author of My Jewish Year 18 Holidays, One Wondering Jew
