Reviews

The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas by Dylan Thomas

ilybinaya's review against another edition

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3.0

sorry for my impatience to not really having the heart to read through every word as exact as it could but, or to give the poems a closer reading as they should have been. but wholly from the reader's experience, the poems feel like they're based on the same sentence structure, or that reasoning of having to use the same sort of phrase for every stanza, which that sort of repetition is giving me goosebumps that i honestly no longer care for what is underneath the apparent lyricism radiating from Thomas's ink, and the poems do feel too artificial and carefully constructed in the way that even "do not go gentle into the night" feels insincere and painstakingly lacks of real meaning. for sure, it is up to the reader to feel this connection to the words, but sorry great Thomas, i just am not on your side of the team. the imagery feel surprisingly empty after so much layered lines and an unimaginative approach to link all the pretty words together. the only change of form is depicted in a few of the latter poems in this collection, and again up til that point i seriously couldn't care any less because all i saw is those alliterations and rhythms and that "smart" strategy to give every line a word with the same starting letter. thoroughly i can declare on my behalf that dylan thomas is a boring person, maybe we should pay a visit to his home in wales, just in case i got any revived interest in his poems, or maybe as i age with a better mentality to appreciate his works. c'est tout.

colemanwarnerwriter's review

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I feel like Thomas has a lot to say but I'm just not smart enough to understand it. Nonetheless, the things he does with the English language is quite extraordinary, and I'm happy to have read these poems.

This Bread I Break

This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day or wind at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.


Once in this wine the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.


This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of the sensual root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

eren_reads's review

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emotional reflective

4.0

themodvictorian's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense

ygelas's review against another edition

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medium-paced

3.5

christynhoover's review against another edition

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Read the Prologue and the first six poems. Too much work to fathom it so I gave up. 
I do like A Child's Christmas in Wales, found a performance of Under Milk Wood to be interesting and LOVE listening to recordings of Dylan Thomas reading his own work!

But this poetry collection --a nonstarter.

mugren's review against another edition

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1.0

The only poems I liked were 'And death shall have no dominion' and 'Do not go gentle into that good night'.

writersbeard's review against another edition

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medium-paced

4.0

geese82's review against another edition

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3.0

This is superb poetry right here but it didn't capture my attention even though I took my time reading this. I like Dylan Thomas' style for it was similar to the melancholic poetry I've read on tumblr poetry or any other free verse poems of today. The use of words is something that I won't be seeing anymore, the rhyming, the word play. I am sad that he died young, I just wished he lived longer and created more poems.

This might not have the same unf! factor other poets that I've read. But if you want to read a pure english poetry without too shakespearean I recommend this in your reading along with e.e. cummings, ezra pound and anything early - mid 20th century poets of English.

redbluemoon's review against another edition

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5.0

4.5 stars

Most poems really moved me, some I didn't really care for: they weren't for me this time!

Dylan Thomas has demanding style and writing: I'm pretty sure I didn't get everything, and that I could reread it and understand something else!

Most of my favorites deal with death, nature, time, and love.

A great discovery, and a book I'll often flip through!