Seventy-five Years by Peter Leyland
Seventy-Five Years āTWENTY-FOUR YEARS remind the tears of my eyes.ā So wrote Dylan Thomas in 1938. He was, although he didnāt know it, only to live another fifteen years longer, before dying from acute alcohol poisoning in New York during a reading tour of his poems. I first came to his poetry in 1966 when I was in Broadgreen Hospital in Liverpool, recovering from a cartilage operation. There, as chance would have it, I fell in with a fellow patient, Alan, who spoke enthusiastically of Dylan Thomas and recommended that I read his poems. I duly did so, and my edition of his Collected Poems 1934-1952 which I have beside me now is inscribed Peter Leyland Liverpool. 1967. Now, as I begin my seventy sixth year it occurs to me reflexively that five of them have passed since the beginning o...