Collected Poems
- Feb 15, 2024
- 1 min read
Updated: Jun 15
★★☆☆☆
I picked up Collected Poems in a used bookshop I can’t remember where and bought it because it felt, as a writer, as a poet, necessary to read Dylan Thomas, even if I didn’t really know why, and even if what I mostly knew about him I knew from a Simon & Garfunkel song. I should have read a few poems before dropping my ten bucks, and I would have saved myself the misfortune of slogging through thirty-plus of his impenetrable poems, poems that, through their incomprehensibility, tug at me to give them more, yearn for understanding, long to be known and felt and, if not loved, at least appreciated. His words, often to my ears coarse and ugly, even as I recognized the poetry within them, incited none of that desire in me. He is surely a poet for many, perhaps a poet’s poet, and perhaps I will return to this unfinished volume from time to time in the hopes that I one day might get what it’s all about, but until that day, give me Sandburg, Oliver, Whyte, Limón, Berry …
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