Date:

Friday May 14th

From 7pm

Online

International Dylan Day 2021

From under the mask: Dylan Thomas’s Fifth Notebook in the time of Covid

Dylan Thomas’s fifth notebook of June 1934-August 1935, lost for over seventy years before its discovery in 2014, was published in September 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. It contains the only copies in the poet’s own hand of such masterpieces as ‘Especially when the October wind’, ‘I dreamed my genesis’ and ‘Altarwise by owl-light’.

Many of its fifteen poems evoke the pain of separation, isolation and illness, of being trapped in a ‘town of ghosts’, suffering the drag of ‘time in the hourless houses’, with the sickness of those ‘cast to plague’ ever-present. By historical coincidence, Dylan’s struggles as a poet seem to speak to our own recent traumas in prophetic images of ‘the antiseptic funeral’, from ‘under the mask’. And yet these poems also record his escape from ‘death’s corridor’, as the young artist found his voice, and sickness and separation gave way to creativity and connection to ‘roar and rise on heaven’s hill’.

On International Dylan Day 2021, Prof John Goodby and Dr Adrian Osbourne, the editors of The Fifth Notebook of Dylan Thomas, and Hilly Janes, author of the acclaimed biography The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas, invite you to join them for a discussion of the notebook and a very special reading of the notebook poems by a stellar cast of leading Welsh poets.

Readers include:

Eric N’Galle Charles, Ian Davidson, Lee Duggan, Peter Finch, John Goodby, David Greenslade, Natalie Holborow, Wanda O’Connor, Adrian Osbourne.

Friday, 14 May, 7.00 p.m. – 8.00 p.m.

https://shu.zoom.us/j/9177866721

Contact: j.goodby@shu.ac.uk for further details