LAST Friday (July 28), a talk was given by PhD student Adrian Osbourne at Tenby Museum on the recently discovered fifth notebook of Dylan Thomas.

Swansea University had acquired this fifth notebook in 2015. The notebook takes the form of an old school exercise book, its front cover lost, and contains 19 handwritten poems that Thomas wrote between 1934 and 1935. The four previous notebooks cover the period between 1930 and April 1934. These notebooks provided all of the material for both his early publications and his later ones, including a draft of The Hunchback in the Park, which appeared in his later collection, Deaths and Entrances.

All of the poems in the fifth notebook were published in his first two collections and provide the only manuscript copy of many of his poems. The notebook shows Dylan to be a poet of process and reveal his continuing obsessions with sex, death, dreams and the contrast and conflict between creativity and destruction.

Adrian illustrated his talk with various slides from the manuscript, some of which had very few changes, others showing Dylan’s passion for using the absolutely correct word that did not always make understanding of the work the easiest!

Kathy Talbot, museum trustee, thanked Adrian for a most interesting talk and informed the audience of two future events at the museum -a talk by artist Guy Manning on his year long daily painting project (August 11) and the performance at Church House of For As Long As Forever Is, a creative piece on Dylan Thomas written by the museum’s curator, Mark Lewis, as part of the Tenby Arts Festival on September 28.