DYLAN

The "Audio CD of the Commute" last week was "The Essential Dylan Thomas", a four CD collection bought for me one Christmas a few years ago after we'd spent a damp autumnal evening watching A.N. Actor performing some of the great Welsh poet's works during his tour with a one-man show.

I'd listened to one or two of my favourite pieces at the time and then put the box on a shelf to gather dust, as these things do, and, having never played it through in its entirely, decided that it wasn't a bad starting point in my search to fill the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle shaped hole in my journeys to work.

Coincidentally, when I finally put the first disc into the machine and pressed "play", it was a little over sixty years and three weeks since the main work recorded on these discs, the now rather legendary play for voices that is called "Under Milk Wood" was first performed by Richard Burton and the rest of the cast, way back in January 1954.

It's a bit of a smutty old piece really, at least it is on the quiet and if you listen between the lines. I don't know whether some of the expressions being used have become ruder since it was first broadcast, or whether Thomas was just trying to slip a few things past the censors because that's just the way he was, but it's definitely chock-full of innuendo for the modern listener. Although, seeing as most generations think that they were the ones who first discovered sex, perhaps it comes as some surprise to discover how much it remained on the minds of those living in those impoverished communities way back before even our parents were twinkles in somebody's roving eye.

The words Thomas uses are mostly very bleak and cynical, born as they were in the pitiable poverty of South Wales between the two World Wars. This seems especially true on the first two CDs which seem to be made up of the more melancholy works and end with a collection of poems which include the famous titles "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" and "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night", phrases which both sent something over a shiver down my spine as I drove homewards across the bleak hill tops on that recent midwinter evening.

The language really is very doom-laden on the whole, maybe because of being born from the fire and brimstone of regular attendance at Chapel, and brewed in the crucible of war, but given that Thomas died at the age of thirty-nine back in 1953, it's just plausible that his own mortality was very much on his mind as he went about his work, perhaps most noticeably in pieces like "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog" and the exceptional "Return Journey to Swansea".

Things brighten up when the subject of his stories turn to Thomas's childhood in Wales, although often still laced with a melancholy streak, although my favourite piece, the one which stuck with me long after that evening watching and listening to that lone actor, was "The Outing" a hilarious take upon Welsh Life involving a boozy day out in a charabanc…

Dylan Marlais Thomas was born almost a hundred years ago in Swansea on the 27th of October, 1914 (So I suppose there'll be some sort of centenary celebrations later on this year), and he died the death of a "Roistering, drunken and doomed poet" in New York, just over thirty-nine years later, having become a popular writer, performer and broadcaster during his tragically brief and somewhat turbulent life.

Since his death he has been acknowledged as being one of the most important Welsh poets of the last century, despite his work being originally written in English, and his works are much studied in schools across the world and yet, despite this air of respectability and association with the more formal end of the educational spectrum, aspects of which might have surprised the old Welsh Dog himself, he remains one of the more popular and well-known of the modern poets.

I had a friend who claimed a, perhaps illegitimate, connection to this great modern Welsh poet and, given that she came from the Mumbles, an area much name-checked in his works, and shared a surname which played a large part in his personal history, who am I to doubt it…?

To be honest, I've always struggled a little in appreciating written poetry, but I do rather like the sound of Thomas's works, both for  the rhythm and the original imagery, and I do love the sound of voices reading it. Perhaps this is also because the sound of these readings, especially when being read in those dour Welsh tones, have triggered something very evocative, something that is perhaps a little nostalgic, and reminded me of something very personal which is buried deep within me. Perhaps a sense of "home" (if that's not too pretentious), but certainly not least, I imagine, because they remind me in some ways of how my own father, the lay preacher, used to speak, although he was born ten years later than Thomas, in a different part of South Wales, and lived a very different, and possibly far more God-fearing, life.

I'm sure that Thomas's writings are not for everyone. The emphasis on the fleeting nature of happiness and the impermanence of life are probably not the most uplifting of themes, and, despite the fact that aspects of such thinking can still be seen in the people and towns he was describing, nor is the abject poverty being talked about in much of his work likely to resonate as much as it once did with our modern materialistic, narcissistic and hedonistic culture.

But I bloody love it…