Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems 1934-1952 (New Directions, 1971), third and final selection

Today's the day I depart for the Dylan Thomas Centre to give a workshop using Thomas's notebooks and a reading. I finished rereading the Collected Poems just in time--though I think I may have drawn the reading out for the sake of making it last. Here's the last round of splendid passages.


My silly suit, hardly yet suffered for,
Around some coffin carrying
Birdman or told ghost I hung.

*

Now shown and mostly bare I would lie down,
Lie down, lie down and live
Quiet as a bone.

from "Once Below a Time"

No Time, spoke the clocks, no God, rang the bells,

I drew the white sheet over the islands

And the coins on my eyelids sang like shells.

last lines of "When I Woke"

O keep his bones away from that common cart,

The morning is flying on the wings of his age

And a hundred storks perch on the sun's right hand.

last lines of "Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid

Was a Man Aged a Hundred"

Under the mile off moon we trembled listening

To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound

And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing

The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.

from "Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed"

...the wall thin as a wren's bone

*

...the splashed mothering maiden

Who bore him with a bonfire in

His mouth and rocked him like a storm....

*

For I was lost who have come

To dumbfounding haven

And the finding one

And the high noon

Of his wound

Blinds my

Cry.

*

The world winding home!

And the whole pain

Flows open

And I

Die.

from "Vision and Prayer"

And he who taught their lips to sing

Weeps like the risen sun among

The liquid choirs of his tribes.

from "Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait"

        Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means

*

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows

In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs,

           Before the children green and golden,

                       Follow him out of grace, 

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand....

*

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

                       Time held me green and dying

            Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

from "Fern Hill"

(which I would have liked to copy entire)

Sanctum santorum the animal eye of the wood
In the rain telling its beads, and the gravest ghost
The owl at its knelling.

*

                                              All tell, this night, of him
Who comes as red as the fox and sly as the heeled wind.

from "In Country Sleep"

And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed

Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,

The whole of the moon I could love and leave....

*

Whatsoever I did in the coal-

Black night, I left my quivering prints.

from "Lament"

And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires still.

last line of "In the White Giant's Thigh"

You can buy Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems from Foyle's Books for a mere £7.49 here.

Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems (New Directions, 1971), second selection

More splendid passages from Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems:


Bread and milk mansion in a toothless town.

*

I make a weapon of an ass's skeleton
And walk the warring sands by the dead town,
Cudgel great air, wreck east, and topple sundown....

*

Like an approaching wave I sprawl to ruin.

from "I Make This in a Warring Absence"

If my bunched, monkey coming is cruel

Rage me back to the making house. 

from "'If My Head Hurt a Hair's Foot'"

...the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

*

After the first death, there is no other.

from "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, 

by Fire, of a Child in London"

I rose

In rainy autumn

And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

*

It was my thirtieth

Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon

Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.

from "Poem in October"

Unluckily for a death 

Waiting with the phoenix under

The pyre yet to be lighted of my sins and days....

opening lines of "Unluckily for a Death"

The colossal intimacies of silent

           Once seen strangers or shades on a stair

from "Into Her Lying Down Head"

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

from "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night"

And his nameless need bound him burning and lost

*

                                     ...the long gone glistening

Parish of snow.

*

In that far ago land the door of his death glided wide,

                        And the bird descended.

from "A Winter's Tale"

Silence, silence to do, when earth grew loud,

In lairs and asylums of the tremendous shout.

*

Exiled in us we arouse the soft,

Unclenched, armless, silk and rough love that breaks all rocks.

from "There Was a Saviour"

(Imagine all of "In My Craft or Sullen Art" here. I want to memorize it.)

Begin

With singing

Sing

Darkness kindled back into beginning

When the caught tongue nodded blind,

A star was broken

Into the centuries of the child

Myselves grieve now, and miracles cannot atone.

*

And the dust shall sing like a bird

As the grains blow, as your death grows, through our heart.

*

Love is the last light spoken.

from "Ceremony after a Fire Raid"

A copy of Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems is a mere £7.49 from Foyle's Books.

Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems (New Directions, 1971), first selection

Some favourite passages as I reread the Collected Poems in preparation for my workshop and reading at the Dylan Thomas Centre in late June....
 

At poor peace I sing
To you strangers (though song
Is a burning and crested act,

*

O my ruffled ring dove
In the hooting, nearly dark
With Welsh and reverent rook,

*

(A clash of anvils for my
Hubbub and fiddle, this tune
On a tongued puffball)

from "Author's Prologue"

O see the pulse of summer in the ice.

*

Here break a kiss in no love's quarry.

from "I See the Boys of Summer"

A process in the weather of the heart

Turns damp to dry; the golden shot

Storms in the freezing tomb.

*

...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. 

from "A Process in the Weather of the Heart"

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.

*

And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind 

How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb

How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

opening and closing lines of "The Force That Through 

the Green Fuse Drives the Flower"

And what's the rub? Death's feather on the nerve?

Your mouth, my love, the thistle in the kiss?

from "If I Were Tickled by the Rub of Love"

By the sea's side hear the dark-vowelled birds.

last line of "Especially When the October Wind"

Joy is the knock of dust....

from "When, Like a Running Grave"

I with the wooden insect in the tree of nettles,

In the glass bed of grapes with snail and flower,

Hearing the weather fall.

*

Love like a mist or fire through the bed of eels.

*

I, in a wind on fire,....

from "I, in My Intricate Image"

...dusk is crowded with the children's ghosts....

from "Why East Wind Chills"

The ball I threw while playing in the park

Has not yet reached the ground.

last stanza of "Should Lanterns Shine"

Over the past table I repeat this present grace.

last line of "Because the Pleasure-Bird Whistles"

At the time of posting, Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems is available for a mere £7.49 from Foyle's Books--just click this link.

Peter Reading's Stet (Secker & Warburg, 1986)

It's interesting to go back and read Stet (1986) and find the same concerns and methods I had become acquainted with in Reading's later poetry. It's a slim volume of a single poem in multiple voices and hence registers, so it's hard to excerpt. Here, though, are three passages I love. 



              Engines cut out, thick snow dumbed harmonious
              doves numbed in frozen postures of flight and we
                    found in the eerie too-bright morning
                         rhubarb leaves crusting the ice-whorled window.

*

             [Don't go out there--you'll all catch your death of it,
              sinister twits are in the ascendancy.
                     Plump up a stanza, close the brackets,
                            snuggle down into a cosy re-draft . . . ]

*


          Mirage of tangible air, heat-rippled pollened and sweet,
rises as if seen through gently vibrated cellophane, out of

          pub garden well-tended beds. Blaze of a mid-day in June;
yeastily fragrant of new bread, a buff-frothed pint of bright amber,

          cool on an oak table, gleams. (Inverse of Elegy, this.)



I believe Stet to be out of print, but it appears in full in Reading's second volume of Collected Poems.

Edward Dorn's Collected Poems (2012), fifth selection (from Twenty-Four Love Songs, 1969))

Some favourite passages from Twenty-Four Love Songs (1969):


My speech is tinged
my tongue has taken
a foreigner into it
Can you understand
my uncertainties grow
and underbrush and thicket 
of furious sensibility 
between us....

the first half of '3'

...pleasure

unrung by the secretly expected

fingers of last sunday

from '6'

now everywhere I turn

and everytime there is

that full thing with us

I am cottered

from '10'

We made the journey by train

it was cold now and then

a day scored by a cloud

the heat we had we had in our pockets

and occasionally we took some

what more can be said

more than the existence we have

second and final stanza of '14'

There is no final word

for how you are.

An emotional response

can be the reputation to

which all inquiry is referred

and let go at that.

opening stanza of '24'

Buy Edward Dorn's Collected Poems directly from the publisher.

Edward Dorn's Collected Poems (2012), fourth selection (from Geography, 1965)

Some favourite passages:


On the bed of the vast promiscuity
of the poet's senses is turned
the multiple world....

opening lines of "Song: The astronauts"

bent is an attitude

I've settled on now

        to define a man

whose attention is forced down

from "The problem of the poem

for my daughter, left unsolved"

...before the bite of the sun quelled the bite

of the stars, we left....

*

The eye

can be arbitrary,

but its subject matter cannot.

Thus the beauty of some women.

from "Idaho Out"

The occasion for this excursion is in the selected strings

of a life gone terribly lonely. It will be a march.

A frail cloud moves with silence into the window.

No sound in the store. No bell on the door.

*

...in the woven light

of a backroom.

*

...in the ennui of the falling sun....

*

...all things have an insistence of their own.

from "Six Views 

from the same window of the Northside Grocery"

 ...indolent winter stars

are in her eyes

          indolent as she resides

all seasons by the fork

of my desire.

the last lines of "Love Song"

...a growth

of indetermination

while waiting 

out the season

*

I am a casual fool

now

I do so regard

the labor 

of my own

                  careful

peace of mind.

from "Poem in Five Parts"

this is no judgement, this is

the weight of dissimilar things bound together

by a strictly regulated common deprivation

the low and the high, no middle, held in a smiling equilibrium

you may eat only the shit I give you.

*

I became that land and wandered out of it.

*

...my wounded middle years,

                                                a practical self-pity

*

My mother, moving slowly in a grim kitchen

and my stepfather moving slowly down the green rows of corn

these are my unruined and damned hieroglyphs.

*

...and the land was pledged 

to private use, the walnut dropped in the autumn on the ground

green, and lay black in the dead grass in the spring.

from "The sense comes over me, and the waning

light of man by the 1st National Bank"

 Buy Collected Poems directly from the publisher.

Edward Dorn's Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2012), third selection

Some favourite passages from Hands Up!, 1964:


the deer eye opens in the mind
on the acoustics of the hunt....

from "The Deer's Eye the Hunter's Nose"

Walking is what I associate 

with Ledyard, distance as sheer urge....

*

Mystic sheer distance was in thine eye,

that beautiful abstract reckoning,

the feet, walking: for no other reason

the world.

from "Ledyard: The Exhaustion of Sheer Distance"

...for an eye to offer coherence

at times,

you have to use your head as an arbiter,

a relief, for it all.

*

Cheerfulness is still a misleading humor.

Much is blinding

besides the sun. Yet I am sure you see.

The hour is important.

from "The Land Below"

Fog fell down our mountain.

*

The day he died--

the slow quiet break. 

from "Hawthorne, End of March, 1962"

we scoured the ground of the earth

to start fires

in these rickety geographies

we knew better than to call home

from "Oh Don't Ask Why"

 

Finding myself in america

slowly walking around the deserted bandstand, waiting

for the decade, and the facetious new arrivals.

last lines of "A Fate of Unannounced Years"

And two passages from Nine Songs, 1965:

 

how long can love

suffer in the cross streets of this town

marked simply by the clicking railroad

and scratch of the janitor's broom

 

last lines of "3"

 

 

...sustained by the long passion for darkness

man is.

 

from "9"

 

 

 

Edward Dorn's Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2012), second selection (The Newly Fallen, 1961)

Some favourite passages from this book:


...oh mother
I remember your year-long stare
across plowed flat prairielands.

last lines of "3 Farm Poems"

...what a grey morning I am.

from "The Open Road"

March us home through the spring rain

the belief, the relief

of sunday occasion.

 * 

...the triumph of a march

in which no one

is injured.

from "Sousa"

...may their failure be kindly, and come

in small unnoticeable pieces.

last lies of "Like a Message on Sunday"

The slight stories of explanation

were never meant to be remembered, they are

as change, counted, and then pocketed:

                                       O was one

of their determining inventions

zero, for an empty class, a symbol for nothing,

endowed the void.

from "Our Camp"

Now the yellow strings

Of dusk hang in the air....

from "A Country Song"

 

R.F. Langley's Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2000), first selection

Some favourite passages:



...soothed
passage of the cars, slight
pressure of the sparrow's
chirps--just what the old glass
gently tested, bending,
she would have meant, and not
a dream ascending. 

*

...the lie she told to throw
the truth into relief.

Into the pure relief
of ordinary light.

from "Mariana"

We leave unachieved in the 

summer dusk. There was no

need for you rather than me.

Here is the unalterable truth.

*

Now, when I need it, I'm so close

to emptiness.

*

We find

peace in the room and don't

ask what won't be answered.

from "The Upshot"

We sway up, shut

down and open, coolly, each

small hour.

*

These inroads let

me understand, and mark

sharply. Over what? Over

brilliant quietness.

*

White hedonism cut on blue

intelligence and laced

with silver anxiety. Bravo.

from "The Ecstasy Inventories"

It is a common experience to come upon a

pale, glittering house set far back across

a meadow. It is certainly inside you.

*

The unexpected colours stare. The crowd

is wholly intent. A fluttering. A blaze.

*

The self is felt, 

as standing, fired, inside the diamond.

from "Juan Fernandez"

The drunk. Hush. Lay him down in

the sound of his name.

from "Saxon Landings"

O you, o you he

this, she this

here, once, and

again and again

fieldgate.

from "Blithing"

Unbidden thoughts come sometimes

lustrous.

from "Rough Silk"

Once more the menace of the small

hours and of coming to light and of

each sharper complication.

*

This still

increasing presence is for the last time.

Then the beginning of an immense grip.

*

Nothing I want settles

anything.

*

It's a strange 

relief to transform your fretting into

the silent coiling of a phantom dragon.

from "The Gorgoneion"

R.F. Langley's Collected Poems is available directly from the publisher at a discount.

Veronica Forrest-Thomson's Collected Poems (Shearsman, 2008), first selection

This first selection comes from Forrest-Thomson's collection, Identi-kit (1967).




The world is winched on an iron chain,
then whirled on a wheel of frost.

*

a sudden jangling skeleton of sound

*

the red-cold sky

from "January Morning"

Wearied with myself I want

a picture that simplifies.

from "Identi-kit"

Entering the dim air where edges

are furred like geranium leaves,

the mind blurs in sympathy,

the line dividing plant and primate,

until to think seems out of place.

opening stanza of "In the Greenhouse"

a will stalled in civilised complexity

*

trying to electrify the unconducive days

from "Aries"

Year's spectrum modulates 

around the centre spectre.

Each single moment's tone

appears alone, yet signals

the gradation in the air

toward the centre spectre;

opening stanza of "Ambassador of Autumn

(By Paul Klee)"

You taught me language, left me with words in hand

to spin their critical cocoon around a life

which others lead, which I can merely understand,

caught in a  web of maybe, ought, and if;

*

exist to exorcise by implication

the amorphous impulses of beast and bird

which, when in need of explication,

must manage without benefit of word.

first and third stanzas of

"The Sentence"

You can buy Veronica Forrest-Thomson's Collected Poems in the UK from Foyle's and in the US from Small Press Distribution.