Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas

Collected Poems
By Dylan Thomas


I recently starting commuting every morning to my summer job in D.C. and I've been trying very hard not to read this on the metro. It isn't that the work isn't incredible (it is) just that I don't want to be the one prick in the ocean of riders locked on Janet Evanovich and The Secret reading Dylan fucking Thomas.
At a certain point I just gave up. I've never read the fully collected work of a poet before and it's definitely an experience I'd recommend. His transition in style is palpable. Thomas's poems get progressively longer and more concerned with structure. Personally I prefer the earlier stuff (see, those are the kind of things that make me feel like an asshole) but there's great content all through.
About every third poem hit me hard. I found myself calling friends in the middle of the night telling them they needed to go online and read "The hand that signed the paper" because I needed to talk to someone else about it. For someone I certainly would not classify as a love poet, Thomas writes about love more convincingly than the so-called romantics. When he writes "Daft with the drug that's smoking in a girl/and curls round the bud that forks her eyes" I shudder.
Another interesting thing about reading a collection like this one is that it's easy to see patterns in word-use and subject. He has a big thing for the word "marrowed" and for animal imagery. But not obnoxious animal imagery.
It's not hard to see how Thomas influenced later generations of poets. He writes about love, politics and society as someone removed yet immersed in all of them. But most importantly, he writes about death. In fact all of his poems are about death. The last one in my copy, "Elegy" I've already decided I want read at my funeral. Thankfully I won't be around to see my mourners complain about what a pretentious dick I was to have that read at my funeral.