[Maryann Corbett]

A lot has happened here since I've been back, and it will need replies in several directions.

Just so it's clear, when I posted this thread I hadn't been following the poetry boards for a while and had no specific poems or crits in mind, though I had been following the "Contemporary Taste" discussion on Discerning Eye. Sorry if there was any confusion about that.

Colin, I'm glad you liked it!

Steve, that's a very learned and thorough explication. I don't think anyone is surprised to see sexuality in DT, but sometimes it benefits from, er, exposure.

Lance, your point about adjectives is the very one that I'm most concerned about. It's true that this poem is very, very dense with the inventive adjectives. But I also wonder if we aren't at times overly doctrinaire about what has been called here "Golias's razor," the ratio of adjectives to words in the poem. I happen to think that adjectives are not all alike, so I'm glad to see somebody else saying that at least a little.

Last night I happened upon "The Fellow Human" in Les Murray's Learning Human (thanks to Rose K. for getting me started reading this). It's a collection of the poems LM considers his best, according to the dust jacket, so we can't write it off as immature work. The poem is built up of descriptions of women driving up to a school and gathered talking. Here's one stanza:

Another, serene, makes a sad-comic mouth beneath glasses
for her fine-necked rugby-mad boy, also in glasses,
and registers reed notes in the leatherhead birds' knotty music
as they unpick a red-gold judge's wing of bloom
in the silky-oak tree above the school's two classes.

Did you count all those hyphenated adjectives? This is what I'm driving at: there are effects that only adjectives will accomplish, and sometimes we simply need a lot of them.

Getting back to D. Thomas, if "All That I Owe..." is a very early poem, then it comes from a time when the sound of the Victorians was still in a lot of ears. Apart from the sheer number of the adjectives, what interests me is their inventiveness. Maybe the poetry I've been reading lately has been too much on the plain and prosy side, but it seemed to me that this poem was a useful reminder that we need to reach outside the conversational norms of language sometimes, and that if we don't do that enough, we might not end up with poetry.

About technical/textual matters: Google books provides us with two "collected" versions: the 1950s version that Thomas was in charge of, which doesn't contain "All That I Owe...," and the 2003 collected, which does, and which says "bonebound" and not "bonehead." (There are a great many versions online that do say "bonehead," though, and I have no idea how that reading originated. Anybody up for online textual criticism?)