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3.0 out of 5 stars
2.75 stars: Abstruse & obtuse, January 19, 2002
This review is from: Dylan Thomas: An Original Language (Georgia Southern University Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Lecture Series) (Hardcover)
From page 110, part of Hardy's treatment of Dylan Thomas's early poem "The Force that Through the Green Fuse":
'The topos of reflexivity is a figure in a poem which makes explicit what is implicitly being said throughout the poem about creativity in the largest sense of the word.'
Unquote! Safe to say that this book can be skipped. Even more of a displeasure than the occasional abstruseness of the prose, however, is Hardy's relentless intrusion of her own personality, her own politics, her own life story, into what is ostensibly a book about Dylan Thomas's prose and poetry. In remarks about the poem "If My Head Hurt a Hair's Foot," Hardy loftily proclaims that because of her ardent feminism, she had qualms about a poem written by a man on the theme of pregnancy. Well, forgive us, Mrs Hardy, but who cares? Hardy praises Dylan Thomas's freedom from the insanity of nationalism (as if nationalism were the 20th century's foremost political evil!), but after raising the topic of politics (hardly germane to most of Thomas's work), she doesn't speculate as to whether Thomas's romanticizing of socialism and communism was particularly astute.
Finally, and this is the most damnable offense, she tells us absolutely nothing new about the poetry or prose of Dylan Thomas; she tells us nothing that could not have been gleaned from Ackerman's book WELSH DYLAN, or Paul Ferris's biography of Dylan Thomas, or William York Tindall's monumental (if sometimes complex) READER'S GUIDE TO DYLAN THOMAS, or the "Twentieth Century Views" collection of essays, edited by C. B. Cox.
Anything to praise about Hardy's work? Well, there is evidence of intelligence in the writing (and a Richard Howard-like fondness for the French or Latin expression where a plain old Saxon one will do quite nicely); her exploration of the alliterative patterns in "After the Funeral" is first-rate; and she is willing to focus her scrutiny on poems and other works by Thomas that do not often benefit from critical attention ("On No Work of Words," "Once It Was the Colour of Saying," and the stories in "Portrait ... Young Dog"). She does admire Dylan Thomas, has read him thoroughly, and her praises are never at the expense of an appropriate critical caution. Still, not enough here to redeem what is ultimately an oppressively stodgy book, far from essential to the admirer of Thomas, and marred by the author's need to make pronouncements and self-admiring references that are neither relevant nor engaging.
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