In the introduction to this remarkable collection of works by and about Dylan Thomas, the Welsh actor Matthew Rhys – who played Thomas in the film The Edge of Love – reflects on the life and legacy of “the 20th century’s first rock star author, famed for his dazzling, imaginative poetry and chaotic personal life”. Thomas, who influenced Bob Dylan and the Beatles, loved radio and delivered a series of BBC broadcasts in the 1940s and early 50s which took in poems, short stories, critical appreciations and reminiscences of his Welsh childhood.
Many of those recordings feature here, including Holiday Memory, a nostalgia-soaked portrait of a sunny August bank holiday in Swansea, and Quite Early One Morning, about a man’s dawn walk through the streets of a seaside town “like a stranger come out of the sea, shrugging off weed and wave and darkness with each step”. In A Visit to America, recorded weeks before the author’s death in 1953 at the age of 39, Thomas relives a recent US lecture tour awash with “exhibitionists, polemicists, histrionic publicists, theological rhetoricians, historical hoddy-doddies, balletomanes, ulterior decorators, windbags and bigwigs and humbugs”.
