The Tiger Poet vs. Dylan Thomas

In several posts on this blog I've often mentioned that my home village is so small that nothing much happens in it. However, if you're Welsh I doubt you've been able to escape from the centenary of this country's most famous poet.

The celebrations surrounding the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dylan Thomas have been nothing if not plentiful. Tributes to the famously exuberant and colourful storyteller have included Benjamin Zephaniah's mission to modernise Under Milk Wood with a cast made up of the residents of Town Hill, a bronze statue of the poet being erected near his house in Swansea, and a drama film shown on BBC One Wales about Thomas's untimely death. To many, Thomas is a defining figure of Welsh poetry and a symbol of Welsh culture, who was just as much renowned for his private life as for his verse.

When it comes to discussing Dylan Thomas, there is always mention of how distinctly Welsh his poetry is. I experienced this first hand during one of my creative writing seminars at university. In a poetry seminar we looked at Thomas's 'Do not go gentle into that good night' as an example of a perfect villanelle. When we were asked to write our own villanelle, I felt it my absolute duty as a Welshman to live up to Thomas's legacy and produce a poem that was just as powerful. I won't put the result up on this blog unless there's a demand for it, but I'll say that id didn't work as well as I hoped, and here's my question. How does my poetry compare to Thomas's?

I'm aware that comparing myself to Dylan Thomas is like comparing a house cat to a lion. In trying to determine common threads between our writing, I'm struck by how I don't measure up to Thomas's energetic poetic voice. Thomas writes about things that are characteristic of Welsh society, such as the tight-knit communities where everybody knows each other and the eccentricities of ordinary people. I write about tigers mostly, but I also write about India, animals in unusual situations, and all kinds of abstract things which poets as far back as the Augustan Age were talking about. In practice, although we share the same Welsh heritage, Thomas's poetry and my poetry couldn't be more different.

There are occasions when I've written about Wales or written in my native voice. Recently, on the advice of a poetry lecturer, I've been writing poems about domestic situations and events from my own childhood. I haven't tried this in a conscious effort to emulate Thomas, but a meagre similarity can be drawn in my new poems' fixation on the Welsh landscape and his own work. In one such poem, 'Wimberries', I attempted to recreate a childhood tale set in the landscape surrounding Blaenavon, in a similar vein to Thomas's depiction of his own childhood in A Child's Christmas in Wales, but really the similarities are not many.

Thomas was writing in a very different era to the one I'm writing in now. He was subject to the hardships of trying to raise a family, sustain both them and himself, and finding time to write poetry in the midst of these pressures, as well as contending with his ever-famous alcoholism. I haven't experienced any of those things, and I wonder sometimes if I had been born back then, would I have been subjected to any of Thomas's rigours?

Of course, I'm speculating way too much and punching far above my feeble weight, but in comparing my poetic efforts to those of arguably the greatest Welsh poet, I hope I can shed some light on how my own work has room to develop. As a fledgling writer, I can't hope of matching the likes of Dylan Thomas, but by seeing what worked for him, I might find something that will work for me.

Anyways, Happy Centenary Dylan Thomas!

Kalua

His father was a king,
his grandfather too,
and his great grandfather greater still.

The tiger cub hid in the thickets,
waiting for Mother to return
from her hunt in the meadows.
Would it be a chital, a sambar deer,
or a langur monkey?
Monkeys were his favourite.

Mother and Brother,
the only familiar things
in a perilous forest.
Monitor lizards and peacocks
startled him at first.
When he grew bigger
they fled as he approached.

His teeth and claws became blades,
and his prey's hide was no longer tough.
He sharpened his claws for battle
and flexed his tail and whiskers,
his eyes fixed on Father's domain.

Father had ruled the forest
with scars to remind others
of those who dared contest him.
His son refined his weaponry,
and his roar, but in his heart
he was still a cub.

Father and Son met on the ridge,
silhouetted in the amber glare.
Son emerged with scars of his own,
to remind him of Father's supremacy.
Maybe the forest beyond the meadows
would have a kingdom waiting for him.

The Tiger Poet

(This poem is a tribute to the tiger known as Kalua, the Prince of Bandhavgarh, who I encountered four years ago. A reading will be available on my YouTube channel soon.)

Tiger Verse Update

Hello. The Tiger Poet here.


I'm aware that this blog has hardly been updated since my last post. I'm working on several poems, one of which has been published on my YouTube channel, and I'm still waiting for something to happen in this impossibly dull village.


Also, I have to address the change of name. I like to go by a moniker, and my last one turned out to have been used by someone else. Hopefully you'll prefer this one.


When something happens, I'll let you know. In the meantime, check out my poem 'Guardian of the Sacred Forest' at this link http://youtu.be/THeV49pBnOM


Will be back soon.