The COLLECTED LETTERS OF DYLAN THOMAS - Hardcover

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Constantine FitzGibbon's 1966 Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas contains some 230 entries; the present thick volume, edited by Thomas biographer Ferris, has more than twice that, and has thus already established a place for itself. It seems fair to say that the new collection contains about the same percentage of "nuggets" as the old. The most important new entries are to Thomas's wife, Caitlin (they include a touching birthday poem to her from the year before Thomas's death). Also important are the subject index and the rearrangement of and textual addition to the letters to Pamela Hansford Johnson. But a great many of the new letters are, admittedly, trivial, as Thomas cadges money, acknowledges appointments, etc. Thomas scholars will surely want to see this; libraries without such clientele should note that the quite adequate FitzGibbon is still listed in BIP for $10. Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse,
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Only some 300 of Thomas's letters have hitherto been published, and here are over 1000 of them, meticulously edited by his prize-winning biographer, a bonanza not simply for students of poetry but for anyone who enjoys good letters. "I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me," says Thomas in a letter to a friend, and these letters, extending from his adolescence to his death in Manhattan in 1953, at age 39, carefully composed as though with an eye to posterity, give plentiful evidence of all three, though the madness seems closer to cunning. Here is the bohemian poet "mad with words," self-obsessed, invariably hard up for cash, by turns malicious and disarmingly frank, always bubbling with life. There are letters to Eliot, Spender, Edith Sitwell, Graham Greene and Henry Miller; passionate effusions to his wife Caitlin; and, among the most interesting because of the long discussions of his craft they contain, letters to fellow Welsh poet Vernon Watkins and to Pamela Hansford-Johnson. Nearly all the letters stimulate and, despite Thomas's faults or because of them, entertain.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.