Like many other poets, I first discovered him at school. We decided that the resurrection in “And Death shall have no Dominion” was purely a physical and vegetable one, unlike the spiritual one we were finding in Donne and Herbert. A bit like Hopkins in the sheer whirl and delight of words, and the need to puzzle out much of the elliptical meaning. “Fern Hill” always makes me think of my father’s reminiscences of his wartime evacuation to the countryside with his school. He did not stay on a farm, but the sense of release yet security, the vanishing of childhood, is the same. My best Dylan Thomas moment is from I think spring 2013: the first modern Passion Play in our town. The community choir I was in sang much of the background music, and one song was a haunting, intense setting of “Do not go Gentle”. I remember standing near the top of the main street with the rest of the choir, singing “Rage, rage, rage, rage! Do not go gentle” right into the eyes of the players and spectators. Favourites are: “And Death shall have no Dominion”, “Poem in October”, and “Fern Hill”. I also have his anthology of spoken verse, “The Colour of Saying” in a handsome hardback still with its dustjacket, a happy find somewhere once.

Praised for his verbal inventiveness, image-making power and almost pagan metaphysics, Dylan Thomas's poems are visions of creation and mortality. This is a collection of his work.