[In the following review, O'Brien offers tempered assessment of The Puberty Tree.]

It can seem that there are two D. M. Thomases. On the one hand, there is the poet of memorable lyrics and dramatic pieces, formally various, moving readily between tradition and modernity; on the other, a writer with a broken thermostat, his poems marred by the effort to force significance on their material. The two poets can be found at work on facing pages through most of this collection.

At times, the division between the products of a gift and those of the will recalls some of the work of the late George MacBeth from the 1960s and 70s, for example in the slightly dated ingenuity of the early science fiction/mythological monologues from Two Voices (1968)—“Missionary” (“A harsh entry I had of it, Grasud”), “Tithonus” and “Hera's Spring.” The 1960s are also apparent in the social and sexual attitudes revealed in the erotic poems of schoolteaching, “Private Detentions” and “A Lesson in the Parts of Speech” Alongside these, though, is the subtler “Pomegranate,” one of several poems employing the myth of Persephone, in this instance, to trace the growing-up of the daughter of separated parents who is seen leaving Hades with a bag “full of books I'll expect her to know”.

Mythology appeals to both Thomases. At best it's a means of understanding, at worst an auto-pilot. The most powerful myth, coming into its own in Love and Other Deaths (1975), is that of Thomas's Cornish family; people are so intensely present in the poet's childhood as to seem more than themselves. Aunt Cecie, for example, the taken-for-granted spinster, is disclosed in death as the real life of the house, and the poet hears her “struggle to sit up in the coffin” in order to get on with her work. The old age of the poet's mother intensifies his need of her even as he charts his self-protective detachment in “The Journey,” a poem which then modulates effectively from regretful matter-of-factness to submission to his own place in the story: “we are water and moor, / And far journeyers together. Whatever else we are.” “Rubble” goes over this ground again, trying to identify the knowledge his mother seems to have attained with the approach of death: “There is / a queer radiance in the space / between us which my eyes / avoid occupying: the radium / Madame Curie found, when desolate / she returned at night to the empty table.” Thomas is unafraid of emotional directness, and for the most part his grasp of the material here keeps him this side of sentimentality.

The strength of these poems (which is also present in later work such as the family portraits in “Under Carn Brea”) depends in part on a regard for the ordinary life through which these haunting personalities emerge. When Thomas neglects this, portentousness can be near at hand. “Surgery,” for example, looks at the role of a doctor in the experience of husband and wife as a marriage ends: she writes “prescriptions in a language / she herself hardly begins to know. / Something to carry her into the terrible valley. / Something to carry him into his terrible liberation.” The experience may indeed be terrible, but the word, employed here as a rhetorical token, rather in the manner of Ted Hughes at his most flatly assertive, only tells what the poem ought to show. Some more baldly mythological pieces (“Diary of a Myth-Boy,” “Ani”) seem lulled by a sense of their own credentials into language which is merely uninteresting, and when Thomas turns to the theme he is most commonly identified with—sex—the results can verge on the absurd, as in “Flesh” or “Sestina: Maria Maddalena,” which the reader seems to blunder into like a private party where the theory that eroticism and noise are directly linked is being tested to destruction.

It has been said more than once that Thomas's subjects are love and death, but literature itself should be added to these. The Honeymoon Voyage (1978) and Dreaming in Bronze (1981) contain a number of monologues in the persons of writers or characters, as well as evocations of their imaginative lives—“Lorca,” “The Marriage of John Keats and Emily Dickinson in Paradise,” Don Juan in “The Stone Clasp,” Freud and Jung in “Vienna. Zurich. Constance,” Lou-Andreas Salomé and others in “Fathers, Sons and Lovers.” The last two seem about to step off into prose; not simply “fictive”, they need a wider space in which to operate. Since the end of the 1970s, Thomas's energies seem to have been diverted away from his own poetry, partly into translations—of Pushkin, Akhmatova and Yevtushenko—partly into his work as a novelist, the latter, by his own account in the autobiography, Memories and Hallucinations (1988), not quite voluntarily, though the “open hand” of fiction has clearly retained its appeal. A group of fourteen new and uncollected poems closes The Puberty Tree. Among them “Persephone,” “A Guide To Switzerland” and “In the Fair Field” exemplify the affection, humour and musicality of which this unusual poet is capable when not distracted into oracular vulgarity.