What counts is the poetry …

… More Than a Curmudgeon | Standpoint. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… his style gradually matures to an igneous, prose-like register, puritanically stripped of anything that might suggest ease; a linguistic hairshirt that for all its discomfort remained inescapable. Thomas tells of the Welsh writer Saunders Lewis "taking my hand in both / his and soothing my quarrel / with my English muse with: / ‘But all art is born out of tension'." The poetry here, chronologically ordered, speaks arrestingly of the developing prominence of such tension in Thomas's style, and it is here that the volume's value comes to light.