Welsh Poetry With a Touch of Thomas
 Martin Holroyd |
(4/10/2008) For the poet Aeronwy Thomas, “Fern Hill,” written by her father, Dylan Thomas, continues to have a marked influence in her life. The poem was completed in 1945 and begins by describing a sensuous childhood paradise in a style freed from rhythmic verse, then eventually moves into more adult preoccupations, those of time, memory, mortality, and meaning.
“With its lyrical evocations of childhood amid his awareness of its transiency,” Ms. Thomas said, each time she reads it she “always finds something new.”
Ms. Thomas will be joined by another Welsh poet, Peter Thabit Jones, from Swansea, Wales, where Dylan Thomas grew up, on a monthlong lecture tour of the United States during which they will pay tribute to her father’s legacy. In addition to stops in Chicago, Michigan, Illinois, and Colorado, among other places, the poets will read from their own work, as well as from Dylan Thomas’s, at the Southampton Inn on Saturday at 2 p.m.
The reading is hosted by the North Sea Poetry Scene. The tour has been organized by Stanley Barkan, a writer and publisher at Cross-Cultural Communications in New York City, under the guidance of Vince Clemente, a Sag Harbor poet, teacher, and mentor to many Long Island poets.
The 1930s were considered a time of astounding poetic experimentation when Dylan Thomas arrived on the scene in his early 20s with his first book of published poetry. His work was modern, romantic, and displayed an inventive and novel idiom that broke away from the traditions of his contemporaries.
“A good poem,” he wrote, “helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.”
Many lines of his poetry remain very much alive in today’s lexicon, with verses embedded in the memories of many, such as, “Do not go gentle into that good night, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
“Before environmental factors became fashionable,” Ms. Thomas said, “my father was occupied by nature and its harmonious cycle. All his poems touch on birth, death, and renewal.” Her name, Aeronwy, derives from a river in Wales, the River Aeron, beloved by her father.
In fact, she said, “I think he was the first ‘green poet.’ The word most used in his work is green.” For example: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer.”
Mr. Jones said that Dylan Thomas’s poetry “acknowledges in a pantheistic way the eternal link between man and nature and that the same force powers both.” This connects us directly to “contemporary concerns about the environment and global warming.”
In November 1953, after collapsing at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, Dylan Thomas died. He was 39. It was his fourth visit to this country and to Manhattan, which he described as “an enormous facade of speed and efficiency and power behind which millions of little individuals are wrestling in vain with their own anxieties.”
His funeral was attended by literati including E.E. Cummings, William Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams. His wife, Caitlin Thomas, escorted his body back to Wales, where he was buried.
Ms. Thomas is the steward of her father’s works in her role as president of the Dylan Thomas Society. Throughout her life she has also forged her own distinct voice through the publication of several books of poetry and “A Daughter Remembers Dylan,” a recollection of her father.
Her latest book of poems, “Burning Bridges,” from which she will read on Saturday, is culled from more than 30 years of writing and displays the development of her various styles, from meditative and haiku to surrealistic.
Her poem “Last Word,” from her collection “Rooks and Poems,” is addressed to her mother. In it she writes:
Well, she’s done it now
No one can deny it
She’s had the last word.
She told me to come,
I didn’t: she died.
And if she knows
Something
More than I do
She’s not telling,
Not since she died
Though I’m listening
(Most of the time)
for another last word.
Though separated by the Atlantic, Swansea, on the south coast of Wales, and Sag Harbor share a kinship beyond being villages that could be described using the words of Dylan Thomas, where “fishes glide through wynds and shells,” and “claw tracks of hawks” can be seen on a “seizing sky.”
The two ports will also be connected by poetry with the publication of “Bridging the Waters: Swansea to Sag Harbor,” the first in a series of books co-published by The Seventh Quarry Swansea Poetry Magazine and Cross-Cultural Communications. The books will each feature one American and one British poet.
Works by Mr. Jones and Mr. Clemente will be included in the series. “My American brother,” Mr. Jones said of Mr. Clemente. “For the past 11 years, Vince’s influence on me as a poet and a man has been profound.”
The link that the contemporary Welsh poet feels to Dylan Thomas is evident. “There are lines of his that I often think of, such as, ‘This is the World. Have faith,” and ‘Though lovers be lost love shall not.’ “
Mr. Jones found Dylan Thomas’s “Welsh-bardic craftsmanship” astonishing in the poem “Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed,” and it influenced his writing a poem sequence that appears in his latest book, “The Lizard Catchers.” He wanted to catch a similar tone, one that he found “quiet” and “moving.”
The poem, “The Cold Cold Corner,” is written in six parts and is in memory of his late son, Matthew. Its focus is on the stages of grieving and on how the grieving perceive the world around them. “Bereavement,” the title of the first section, fuses totems in nature to such a loss:
Your head is full of trees
And the leaves have fallen.
Your eyes are full of lakes
And the water’s frozen.
Your ears are full of birds
And the songs are stolen.
Your mouth is full of skies
And the clouds are ashen.
Your heart is full of fields
And the grass is barren.
Your soul is full of hills
And the paths are broken.
Your life is full of caves
And the dark is open.
Mr. Jones is thrilled for Aeronwy, he said, and for people to get an opportunity to listen to her “poetic concerns” and to see the quality of her poetry. She has had to work hard “under the enormous shadow of a great and very famous poet.”
In a 1953 interview in The New York Times, Dylan Thomas said that poetry is “statements made on the way to the grave.”
“He did make statements on the way to the grave,” Mr. Jones said, “but each one, each poem, each life experience got him closer to the sheer wonder of it.” He, too, referred to “Fern Hill”: “As Dylan said in one of his finest poems, ‘Time held me green and dying / though I sang in my chains like the sea.’ “
Tickets to the reading cost $20. Afterward, there will be a reception with wine and hors d’oeuvres. The North Sea Poetry Scene, a nonprofit organization founded by Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan, will also host the acclaimed Irish poet Desmond Egan on Friday, April 18, at 7 p.m. at the Southampton Inn. David Axelrod, Suffolk County’s poet laureate, will introduce Mr. Egan, and George Wallace, a former poet laureate of Suffolk, will also read.
Tickets for both events can be purchased in advance by e-mailing thenorthseapoetryscene@hotmail.com.