As 2013 and 2014 converge, so do the anniversary celebrations of two major Welsh poets, Dannie Abse and Dylan Thomas. During 2013, Cardiff born doctor and poet Dannie Abse celebrated his 90th birthday and published his latest collection Speak, Old Parrot, nominated for the TS Eliot Prize. The arrival of 2014 will mark the centenary of the birth of Dylan Thomas, the celebrations for which are being led by Hannah Ellis, his granddaughter and President of the Dylan Thomas Society.
In the grounds of Magdalen College, Hannah and I sit overlooking the Cherwell River within sight of Holywell Ford, a red roofed and vine covered house, where Dylan Thomas lived between 1946 and 1947. Thomas’ oeuvre spans groundbreaking poetry, largely written in his teenage years, prose such as his autobiography Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, and plays for voices including Under Milk Wood. Although she never met her grandfather, (the child of Dylan’s only daughter Aeronwy, she was born over 25 years after the poet’s early death, in 1953 at the age of 39), Hannah not only looks like him, she is also his official spokesperson, and is balancing life as a public figure, primary school teacher, wife, and mother.
Dylan’s work has provided Hannah with a way of interpreting her own experiences. Her favourite poem is ‘The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower’: “Three and a half years ago my mum died, and my son was born within three weeks of that. I saw clear examples of what the poem is about: life and death.” In the face of her grandfather’s contentious reputation for heavy drinking and womanising, Hannah doesn’t indulge in denial, but calls for “a fair picture, a truer picture … he often would sit with just a pint of beer and watch the locals, and always supported the underdog.”
The centenary is an opportunity to refocus attention from the sensationalism epitomised by the 2008 film about Dylan’s life The Edge of Love, back onto his work: “Everything needs to come out; even the negative must be explored. I think we need a bit more critical analysis to reintroduce people to his work. She adds: “I think the centenary celebration is in a strange way not about the centenary. It’s an opportunity. For me, it’s the start; the legacy is the important thing.” Hannah’s portrayal of her grandfather is earnestly honest, an attitude I encounter again in Dannie Abse’s house in North London.
The door into Dannie Abse’s tidy, book-lined study creaks loudly. He laughs: “It’s like me! Old and creaky!” The same humorous honesty pervades the rest of the interview conducted at his large, altar-like desk. Our last meeting was at his 90th birthday meal at an Indian restaurant in south Wales, in a roomful of attentive Welsh literati as he read from his latest book. Abse writes poetry, plays, and prose, including his early autobiography Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve and his novel The Presence which won the 2008 Wales Book of the Year award. He has written and edited 16 books of poetry, and was recently awarded a CBE.
Speak, Old Parrot is a confrontation with old age, the transition from being the youngest of three brothers to being the oldest person in the room. Admitting that “people don’t like to recognise themselves as old” Dannie sees his poems as part of the process and the product of self-recognition; from his armchair, he speaks in almost-poetry: “poetry is not an escape from reality, but a motion into reality.” Dannie seems to share Hannah’s desire for an undeceived prospect of the world, but for a non-religious doctor, the objective reality of old age is often bleak. Dannie is reading the memoirs of his friends; he shows me his bookmarked copy of Walking Wounded: The Life and Poetry of Vernon Scannell, an old friend he met in Soho. When asked ‘what’s next?’ his humour emerges again in a darker shade: “just stick around for a while, is all.”
All poetry must confront mortality, whether prematurely as with Thomas, whose work was always haunted by transience, or, as with Abse, after a career which, now in its tenth decade, could hardly have been more illustrious or productive. Young dog or old parrot, long career or short, these two authors exemplify the power of words in the face of the realities of the human condition. In Speak, Old Parrot, the poem ‘Parrotscold’, mourns the loss of a loved one:
“yet though Beatrice is no more and nothing,
Beatrice is, her shadow hidden in the shade.
So this nightfall, with all your debts to her
Unpaid, raise high and higher the full red glass.”
