A READER'S GUIDE TO DYLAN THOMAS

Tindall has written the clearest and closest explication de texte of Dylan Thomas yet offered; it is a major addition to the Reader's Guide series which has already done analyses of Eliot and Yeats. The Bacchic bard, of course, is a difficult subject: though his themes, first, last and always, were birth, copulation and death, his verse is full of imagistic marvels, sonorous metaphors, Freudian folklore and archetypal terrors. Fortunately Professor Tindall expertly and elegantly wanders the Thomisbel labyrinth, solving almost all the ""extravagant riddles"". A few, some early poems, some later ones, remain syntactically strange, awesomely ambiguous. The debt to Joyce, Hopkins and Lawrence is luly noted, the notebooks carefully explored: all the works are given a sort of line by line elublation and the ""sixteen great poems"" masterfully defined. Thomas was the lyrical surrealist of the age; he was also its most poet-like poet; at a Village party ""First, I'm a Welshman. Second, a drunkard. Third, a heteroscopal"" Sight sears after his death, It can be said he's found in Professor Tindall his finest interpreter, most enthusiastic champion.