Dylan Thomas's spellbinding voice

 When I was a boy, my father brought home an album from the library. The recordings were of Dylan Thomas reading poems.

Abilene, Texas was not exactly a cosmopolitan place in the early 1960s. Thomas was a spellbinding reader. His voice was an instrument I’d not heard before.

I was too little to understand anything he said. But I came away with a conviction that I would like to know poets.

Decades later, I found, in a public library, a book by Ralph Maud and Aneiran Talfin Davies on Thomas’s readings.

Thomas made radio broadcasts featuring his favorite poets. He called them “anthologies,” with comments. He loved the Welsh poets, and so he would read Wilfred Owen, Sir Philip Sidney and Edward Thomas.

His collection of performance material was made by simply copying poems he liked by hand. He’d get a poem in memory by copying it.

He had about 80 in his collection. They were his standards on his reading tours. He could do a broadcast on the spot.

He liked D.H. Lawrence’s “The Ship of Death” with its description of the ship that will take the soul to Valhalla and Housman’s “Infant Innocence” (The grizzly bear is huge and wild … ) 

A concert, if that’s the right word, covered favorite themes: death, doubt, drink.

I like a lot of poets. Today, Thomas would be far down on a list of my favorites. But in a way he got me started.

The real influence here was that of my father. He was a teacher, and he stopped by the college library almost every day. He’d bring home wonders in his scarred and battered briefcase.

Somehow, I came away with the idea that I could get an education from the library. In a way, I did.

• Source: Dylan Thomas’s Choice: An Anthology of Verse Spoken by Dylan Thomas, edited by Ralph Maud and Aneiran Talfin Davies; New York: New Directions, 1963