D. M. Thomas (1935-2023)

Although my degree is in mathematics, my first love was the English language, particularly poetry. Whether in poetry, or the lyrics of a song, or the rhythm of well written prose. I am in awe of the wordsmith. I was fortunate to have a wonderful (Australian) English teacher who instilled in me a love of words. He explained the job of the poet as being “to see something that others do not see and show it to them”. Some years later, at university, I discovered the great Cornish poet, translator and novelist D M Thomas. Through Thomas, I also discovered Anna Akhmatova (“you will hear thunder and remember me”) and Alexander Pushkin (“the bronze horseman”). I read every collection of D M Thomas’s poetry, every one of his novels and most of his translations. I think I was partly spurred on by the realisation that “modern Russian poetry” was a much better ice-breaker at parties than “mathematics”. But it was Thomas’s own poetry that really gripped me. One poem in particular, “Fox”, about the suicide of a close friend has stayed with me over the years; it contains many powerful images (“to stand in the middle of blank walls feels good, but not, surely, when the stripped room is your life, and you hope, and believe, there is nowhere, and nothing, to go?”). I still have my collection of modern poetry from college and many of the verses contained in these dogeared books are imprinted on my mind. Such is the power of words and such is the legacy of D M Thomas.