Welsh Rare One

COLLECTED POEMS (199 pp.)--Dylan Thomas--New Directions ($3.75).

Dylan Marlais Thomas, 38, is a chubby, bulb-nosed little Welshman with green eyes, a generally untidy air, and the finest lyrical talent of any poet under 40. When he settles down to guzzle beer, which is most of the time, his incredible yarns tumble over each other in a wild Welsh dithyramb in which truth and fact become hopelessly smothered in boozy invention. He borrows with no thought of returning what is lent, seldom shows up on time, is a trial to his friends and a worry to his family. But let him sit down to the job of making a poem, and he becomes as conscientious as a medieval stonecutter.

Thomas only intermittently sits down to the work he can do best. To support his family, he has lectured on poetry, written movie scripts, scrounged, and read his or other poems from the lecture platform in a voice as booming and resourceful as a cathedral organ. But what he has written for himself is the envy of most other contemporary poets, a pleasure to anyone who can savor rich language. For all his Welsh thunder and soaring, Thomas knows very well what he is up to: "These poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn fool if they weren't."

On from Rage. The way in which Dylan (pronounced Dillon) Thomas celebrates God and man is not always easy to grasp. He thinks in soliloquy, like Hamlet, perhaps in the hope that the modern world, which seldom hears the modern poet, may sometimes overhear him. Unlike many modern poets, Thomas has never been bitten with the "social consciousness" bug; again like Hamlet, he wrestles with the dilemma of self-consciousness.

What he makes of it in the 90 poems of Collected Poems could pretty much pass for the common round of human experience. His themes are birth and death, the pain and joy of living and loving, animal vitality balanced against spiritual inner lights. At his weakest, he can and does riffle his images and similes like a cardsharp. At his strongest and best, he makes his poetry toe the line of his creed: "Man be my metaphor." In the 22 years since his first poem was published, Dylan Thomas has added mystic affirmation to his lyric rage. Almost as impressive as his growing to maturity is his growing acceptance and readership. Since Collected Poems was published in Britain late last year, it has sold close to 10,000 copies--a remarkable figure for a modern poet.

Back to Laugharne. A poet needs more than the rare flutter of royalties to survive, Thomas feels. Most of all, he needs "a house to go back to . . . whenever he breaks down." The home Thomas can always go back to ("Nothing's any good in London") is in his native Wales, at Laugharne, Carmarthenshire. "It's lovely, on the sea. You can spit right into the sea from our window, and we frequently do--all the time, in fact. I potter in the morning; I'm a very good potterer. I shop, I go to the village, walk around and speak to people. It's a short street and it takes hours to get from one end to the other. I stop at the pub and get back in time for lunch. In the afternoon there's nothing to do, so I work."

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