A poignant tribute to the poet Dylan Thomas (1914-53) by his friend Vernon Watkins comprising the obituary in The Times, four short pieces of prose about their friendship, 20 poems celebrating the friendship with some explanatory notes, and comments by Gwen Watkins on the relationship between the two poets.

Teyrnged ddwys i'r bardd Dylan Thomas (1914-53) gan ei ffrind Vernon Watkins, yn cynnwys y deyrnged a ymddangosodd yn The Times, pedwar darn byr o ryddiaith yn sôn am eu cyfeillgarwch, 20 cerdd yn dathlu'r cyfeillgarwch gyda rhai nodiadau eglurhaol, a sylwadau Gwen Watkins am y berthynas rhwng y ddau fardd.

The close relationship between Dylan Thomas and his friend Vernon Watkins was so intense, amounting to Platonic love on Watkins’s part, that his widow has more than once hinted that it affected their marriage. The friendship meant a lot more to Watkins than to Thomas, who seems to have been capable of love only for himself, and he spurned his friend’s affection, sometimes cruelly. Nevertheless, Watkins continued to be devoted to Thomas, whom he saw as a literary genius worthy of unstinted admiration, and even after his death Watkins went on mourning him and writing about him.

The twenty poems in this slim volume attest to the uncommon love Watkins felt for Thomas. They include the two great Cwmrhydyceirw poems, ‘The Death Mask’ and ‘A True Picture Restored’ where the poet’s grief breaks through what might easily be mistaken for formal elegiacs. If some of the poems repeat the central theme of grief for a dead friend, it is because there is a sense in which Watkins was given to writing the same poem over and over again, in magnificent language but often in the same lofty tone, almost as if, as Glyn Jones once observed, there was ‘no sweat under the armpits’ once Watkins started writing.

To the poems are added here the obituary Watkins wrote for The Times on 10 November 1953 and the four typewritten sheets on which Watkins recorded the facts of their first meeting in 1935, one of which concludes, rather tautologically: ‘The true tragedy of Dylan Thomas’s death is that he died.’ More poignantly and perceptively: ‘He was killed by his own mask, by the grimace which his entertainment produced, by a kind of disgust at the popularity of what he was not.’

An Afterword by Gwen Watkins, the poet’s widow, is reprinted from Portrait of a Friend (1983), the book in which she described the eighteen years in which Watkins and Thomas had known each other. It includes a number of memorable phrases - Thomas at the age of twenty-one, was ‘an anarchic, iconoclastic cherub’ – but offers nothing new.

Meic Stephens

It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgement should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.

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