Cultural highlights 2025: Dylan Thomas, self-publishing and Street Fighting

Peter Finch

This has been a good year for books despite a steady decline in public funding pretty much everywhere.

In these situations technology can sometimes come to your aid. Self-publishing once an expensive and difficult pastime can today be a much easier activity.

Wishing to avoid the trap of editorial interference, uncertainty and delay Solva poet, Ifor Thomas, decided to bring out his most recent set of popular, ballsy and cleverly engaging pieces himself. It’s a great read - first hilarious then heart wrenching.

The Undertaker’s Invoice from Thomas’s own InVoice Books looks just as professional as the very latest titles from Parthian, Penguin or Seren.

And one of those actual very latest would be Grahame Davies’ A Darker Way which is from Seren and proves to be one of the year’s most beautiful sets. ‘The rosebud’s ruby on the briar / each spring is a secret fire’.

This poet seems to have special access to the higher plains. This trip into the darkness might well have provided us with Grahame’s best yet.

Over among the historians pugnacious, witty and unputdownable Dai Smith, at 80 for God’s sake, has now turned to poetry. For 2025 he’s given us Street Fighting and other Past Times (Parthian) which entertains as much as it challenges and never loses sight of the Valley places from which its inspiration springs.

ChatGPT, which I am sure Dai would have nothing to do with, tells me Rian Elizabeth’s poetry is famous for its emotional intensity. There’s a fair bit of that in her 2025 Broken Sleep title maybe i’ll call gillian anderson.

This set is rendered entirely in lower case in my copy which, as I can personally testify, getting the world to stick with will prove a challenge.

Rian’s work has an electric, urban intensity which grabs you and sticks. ‘once, / in the middle of the night / when I was very drunk / and not wearing any trousers / or had lost my trousers, / I walked home from a party to the wrong house.’

Poetry reported

Book of the Year for me, though, is more poetry reported than poetry itself. Jeff Towns’ The Wilder Shores of Dylan Thomas (H’mm Foundation) is a landscape-format heavyweight slab of essays on this most famous of poetry men and his place in the Welsh (and other) universes.

There are eighteen well illustrated chapters here ranging from ‘Dylan Thomas: R S Thomas & Centenaries’ to ‘Dylan Thomas, Sir Peter Blake & Under Milk Wood’.

Towns, the bookseller and DT expert you’d go to the pub with more often than you’d listen to in the lecture theatre, has long turned out readable and entertaining DT reportage.

With this heavy-duty, full colour volume, though, he’s finally excelled himself. A wonderful set.