Tom Lyden is a local poet who has had work published in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. He is very influenced by music and nature, and is currently organising The Basket House group, an arts collective which will stage weekly readings and events in Clifden during the summer.

Tom's writing will be featured on the Clifden & Connemara page from now on.

In Autumn I walked a short distance with Bill Long on the Sky Road. Walked with a man of spirit and determination. A man in his sixties just three years after his transplant. With him I was learning not to give in; not to say that there's nothing left except to die.

In Foyle's he told us about the dead snub-nosed storyteller Dylan Thomas. Dylan the spotty juvenile leaving school and disappointing his father because he wouldn't go to university. It helps in a way to know that Dylan's father was a teacher and well versed in the bardic tradition.

Some critics still say that he wrote incomprehensible verse. He didn't but he would say to love the words, caress the words. The poet at an early age was very interested in making stories. He was able to feel for the trusting and the maimed. I think of him in a green polo neck and waistcoat. In him Bill said an evocation of Moses or at least something timeless and burning with vision lived. He'd peer down at his audience over his glasses; a voice in him like incantation surely.

The older Dylan lived in London for some time and drank too much and was also very unsettled. He spent some time in Glencolmcille looking at the gannets but tired of that too. Ten miles from the nearest human being he was lonely for the uplands, lonely for the young turks at home. The poet going back to his own having had enough loneliness for now.

I'm so glad that he didn't write for the proud man but for the lover. Later with his Irish-born wife Cathlín he would visit Swansea where he was shocked to see places that he'd loved flattened by bombs. 'It was a cold white day. Watkins Street and Fullers Row. Crushes of sleeping woman. No-one seems to remember you.' He'd climb on railings and wonder what happened to that young boy?

He could be the funniest man in London but risking the erosion of his lyrical gift. In the melée of London did he develop a false public persona? In America he spoke of the seedy hunters of culture, the blue rinse brigade. At parties they'd talk about Icelandic ceramics and all the time he'd be thinking about Swansea.

Thank you Bill for helping us to hold on to something. For now we're learning to love the words, knowing that we have something special here. He came to speak to us and we were a bit reverent and we went back with him along the valleys where one of the finest poets who ever lived sat with tousled hair in the firelight.

Tom Lyden
(10 Nov.'97)