STAYING IN DYLAN THOMAS'S HOUSE
Dylan Thomas opened a window in the house of poetry for me. Part of it had to do with his Welshness, and my need to associate myself with that which was mine but not fully mine. But it was also shared affinities — his love/hate for Swansea mirrored mine for Madras.
He called it “an ugly, lovely town…crawling, sprawling…by the side of a long and splendid curving shore”. In the way that this sea-town was his world, middling Madras and her Marina was my world too. “I’ve longed to move away,” he wrote to one of his friends, but he kept coming back, because “it is still the best place.” I understood well the comfort of the familiar, which quickly turns oppressive, the seductive call of the great elsewhere. But it was also his rapaciousness for words themselves, his obsession with the inevitability of decay, his placing the body in the centre of the universe. “My body was my adventure and my name,” he wrote in The Peaches.
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Dylan Thomas opened a window in the house of poetry for me. Part of it had to do with his Welshness, and my need to associate myself with that which was mine but not fully mine. But it was also shared affinities — his love/hate for Swansea mirrored mine for Madras.
He called it “an ugly, lovely town…crawling, sprawling…by the side of a long and splendid curving shore”. In the way that this sea-town was his world, middling Madras and her Marina was my world too. “I’ve longed to move away,” he wrote to one of his friends, but he kept coming back, because “it is still the best place.” I understood well the comfort of the familiar, which quickly turns oppressive, the seductive call of the great elsewhere. But it was also his rapaciousness for words themselves, his obsession with the inevitability of decay, his placing the body in the centre of the universe. “My body was my adventure and my name,” he wrote in The Peaches.
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GIRLS ARE COMING OUT OF THE WOODS
IS FEATURED IN THE GUARDIAN'S
SUMMER BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL ONDAATJE
TD: Is it important that you like your characters?
MO: I tend to like them. That may be a flaw. (laughs).
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Tishani Doshi performs Girls are Coming out of the Woods. photo: Carlo Pizzati
GIRL IN A BOX
PORTRAITS BY RICCARDO CAVALLARI
PORTRAITS BY RICCARDO CAVALLARI