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In a previous poem (Anno Dylani 1969), I alluded to how Dylan Thomas made me want to write. When Wendy and I flew to New York to celebrate our 45th wedding anniversary, I wanted to walk in the footsteps of my hero. In 1953, on his fourth tour of the United States in less than three years, Dylan Thomas was not a well man. The people who were supposed to be taking care of him…tour manager…lover and doctor all failed him spectacularly and Dylan died of oedema, fatty liver and bronchopneumonia in a New York hospital.

We visited The Chelsea Hotel, a haunt of the great and good in the New York artworld and Dylan’s home at the time of his death and a visit to The White Horse Tavern, arguably Dylan’s favourite haunt in Greenwich Village. Once there we had a drink in Dylan’s honour.

A DRINK WITH DYLAN…

Transated by Lytton Smith

This newly re-published book (February 2023) was sent to me for review by the people at Peirene. I’ve long admired the USP of Peirene, a small publisher of contemporary, high-quality European novellas in translation. Unfortunately, our house is being renovated at great length, and I lost the book in the boxes and rubble for a while, but it eventually resurfaced for a photo.

First published in Icelandic in 2016 (and in an English translation elsewhere in 2019), the story revolves around a PhD candidate researching the life and work of an obscure artist, who believes she has stumbled upon a mind-blowing revelation in the course of her historical research.

When it dawns on her, however, that in her haste to draw professionally-useful conclusions she has made a fatal error, her working premise implodes. She enters an all-consuming spiral of denial, shame and paranoia.

The book’s style…

“A scintillating vision of the domestic everyday, Nature morte from 1939 embodies the expressive possibilities of light and color. A superlative example of Pierre Bonnard’s late still lifes, the present work dates to the year in which the artist permanently relocated to the Côte d’Azur as a consequence of the Second World War and subsequently experimented with his most radically vibrant palettes. Nature morte typifies the revolutionary vitalization of still life scenes that positions Bonnard as among the greatest twentieth-century pioneers of this genre…Communicating a potent dialogue between forms, Nature morte evinces Bonnard’s radical approach to spatial design. The voluminous modeling of the fruit contradicts the surrounding interior, whose myriad juxtaposing patterns defy a fixed sense of perspective. Instead of recessing towards a vanishing…

“…As Paul Gauguin, the original owner of Young Lady in a Loge Gazing to Right, reflected after viewing another painting in the series, “Mlle Cassatt has as much charm, but she has more power” than her female contemporaries (as quoted in The Queen Bees: The Women Who Shaped America, New York, 1979, p. 117). It is this exceptional combination of beautiful execution and eloquent perspective in Young Lady in a Loge Gazing to Right that established Cassatt’s status as an art historical icon and has compelled audiences since the work’s likely debut at the 1879 Impressionist exhibition…”

Christie’s

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