Fascinating insight into the tempestuous life of one of our great poets through his letters, including those to the two great loves of his life. Featuring a bold new livery in celebration of the Dylan Thomas centenary. Dylan Thomas' letters to the many women in his life are among the mst emotive, lyrical and beautiful that he wrote. Full of humour, longing and uninhibited honesty, these letters include those written to his wife Caitlin and his childhood sweetheart, Vera Philips.

"Like most great letter-writers, Thomas had the gift of writing as if his correspondent stood in front of him. Sensual and earthy, like so much of his poetry, his letters were all designed to secure Thomas's place in his lover's heart and memory - the purpose of all true love letters."--BOOK JACKET.

Like Shakespeare and Joyce before him, Dylan Thomas expanded our sense of what the English language can do. Rhythmically forceful yet subtly musical and full of memorable lines, his poems are anthology favourites; his 'play for voices' Under Milk Wood a modern classic. Much loved by The Beatles and Bob Dylan, he is a cultural icon and continues to inspire artists today. This new edition, released to commemorate the centenary of Thomas's birth, collects more of his poems together in a single volume than ever before. With recently discovered material and accessible critique from Dylan Thomas expert John Goodby, it looks at Thomas's body of work in a fresh light, taking us to the beating heart of his poetry.

Dylan Thomas's letters bring the fascinating and tempestuous poet and his times to life in a way that no biography can. The letters begin in the poet's schooldays and end just before his death in New York at the age of 39. In between, he loved, wrote, drank, begged and borrowed his way through a flamboyant life. He was an enthusiastic critic of other writers' work and the letters are full of his thoughts on the work of his contemporaries, from T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden to Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. More than one hundred new letters have been added since Paul Ferris edited the first edition of the COLLECTED LETTERS in 1985. They cast Thomas's adolescence in Swansea and his love affair with Caitlin into sharper focus. A lifetime of letters tell a remarkable story, each taking the reader a little further along the path of the poet's self-destruction, but written with such verve and lyricism that somehow the reader's sympathies never quite abandon him. The definitive collection of Dylan Thomas's letters reprinted to celebrate the centenary of his birth and featuring a bold new livery.

Discovering Dylan Thomas is a companion to Dylan Thomas’s published and notebook poems. It includes hitherto-unseen material contained in the recently-discovered fifth notebook, alongside poems, drafts and critical material including summaries of the critical reception of individual poems. The introductory essay considers the task of editing and annotating Thomas, the reception of the Collected Poems and the state of the Dylan Thomas industry, and the nature of Thomas’s reading, ‘influences’, allusions and intertextuality. It is followed by supplementary poems, including juvenilia and the notebook poems ‘The Woman Speaks’, original versions of ‘Grief thief of time’ and ‘I fellowed sleep’, and ‘Jack of Christ’, all of which were omitted from the Collected Poems. These are followed by annotations beginning with a discussion of Thomas’s juvenilia, and the relationship between plagiarism and parody in his work; poem-by-poem entries offer glosses, new material from the fifth notebook, critical histories for each poem, and variants of poems such as ‘Holy Spring’ and ‘On a Wedding Anniversary’ (including a magnificent, previously unpublished first draft of ‘A Refusal to Mourn’). The closing appendices deal with text and publication details for the collections Thomas published in his lifetime, the provenance and contents of the fifth notebook, and errata for the hardback edition of the Collected Poems.

Waldo: a loner, an obsessive, the son of a famous writer - but which one? His mother Rosalind: did this old lady really work for MI5? Rachel: poet, Jew, Quaker - why is she taking such risks for the sake of friendship? Martin: her husband: retired academic, amateur detective, who is tested to the limit by events past and present in his new home in rural Wales. In this chilling mystery winding around the secret life of Dylan Thomas, each of the characters is confronted by the legacies of parents to their children. None of them could guess how stories from the past would shape their lives, and plunge them into elemental and dangerous relationships of their own. Set in the Aeron Valley and in Corsica this intriguing and ingenious novel is imbued with the spirit of Dylan Thomas. It marks a chillingly authentic fictional debut.

The last days of five great thinkers, writers and artists - as they come to terms with the reality of approaching death Katie Roiphe's extraordinary book is filled with intimate and surprising revelations. Susan Sontag, consummate public intellectual, finds her rational thinking tested during her third bout with cancer. Seventy-six year old John Updike's response to a fatal diagnosis is to begin a poem. Dylan Thomas's fatal collapse on the floor of a Greenwich Village tavern is preceded by a fortnight of almost suicidal excess. Sigmund Freud understands his hastening decline. Maurice Sendak shows his lifelong obsession with death in his beloved books. The Violet Hour - urgent and unsentimental - helps us to be less afraid in the face of death.

Contributes to the fields of Welsh Studies, Comparative Studies, Transatlantic Studies Offers analyses of key chapters in the cultural making of modern Wales. Offers insights into national and ethnic identity, and encourages readers to consider the extent of Welsh tolerance and intolerance. Draws on Welsh and English language sources, and ranges across literature, history, music and political thought. The book is an example of Welsh cultural studies in action. The book intervenes in key debates within cultural studies: nationalism and assimilationism; language and race; class and identity; cultural identity and political citizenship

The definitive biography of the poet who was almost as notorious for his 'rock 'n' roll' lifestyle as his artistic work Dylan Thomas was a romantic and controversial figure; a poet who lived to excess and died young. An inventive genius with a gift for both lyrical phrases and impish humour, he also wrote for films and radio, and was renowned for his stage performances. He became the first literary star in the age of popular culture - a favourite of both T.S. Eliot and John Lennon. As his status as a poet and entertainer increased, so did his alcoholic binges and his sexual promiscuity, threatening to destroy his marriage to his fiery Irish wife Caitlin. As this extraordinary biography reveals, he was a man of many contradictions. But out of his tempestuous life, he produced some of the most dramatic and enduring poetry in the English language.

Dylan Thomas: A Literary Life offers an account of the poet's life, along with a critical reading of his work, that is designed to close what has been called 'the yawning gap' between Dylan Thomas's popular and critical reputations.