Poet-in-Residence's Book of the Month (May 2008)

In 2000 the University of Wales Press and The Western Mail (Pocket Guide Series) got together with James A. Davies, senior lecturer in English at the University of Wales, to produce a guide to Dylan Thomas and the three places that were most important to him . Poet-in-Residence's copy of Dylan Thomas's Swansea, Gower and Laugharne was obtained recently at no less a location than the Boat House in Laugharne (see below).
The handy (it really is pocket size!) 132 page book contains a dozen colour plates, a collection of black and white snapshots and a street map or two which together with the fact-filled text give a real snooper's eye view of the life of Swansea's favourite son. It's an ideal introduction to the life and work of the great poet.
Mentioned in the front of the book, presumably for anyone wishing to glean further information about this and other books in the Pocket Guide Series, is the following website:- www.wales.ac.uk/press

A process in the weather of the heart

A process in the weather of the heart
Turns damp to dry; the golden shot
Storms in the freezing tomb.
A weather in the quarter of the veins
Turns night to day; blood in their suns
Lights up the living worm.

A process in the eye forwarns
The bones of blindness; and the womb
Drives in a death as life leaks out.

A darkness in the weather of the eye
Is half its light; the fathomed sea
Breaks on unangled* land.
The seed that makes a forest of the loin
Forks half its fruit; and half drops down.
Slow in a sleeping wind.

A weather in the flesh and bone
Is damp and dry; the quick and dead
Move like two ghosts before the eye.

A process in the weather of the world
Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child
Sits in their double shade.
A process blows the moon into the sun,
Pools down the shabby curtains of the skin;
And the heart gives up its dead.

From 18 Poems by Dylan Thomas


*unfished