On Saint David's Day, 1 March 1982, some two thousand people gathered in Westminster Abbey for the unveiling and dedication of a memorial to Dylan Thomas. Among those present was John Ormond, a poet, filmmaker, and friend of Dylan Thomas, who had, like Thomas, grown up near Swansea. He had been invited to read Thomas's "Poem in October," and his presence and participation that day reflect his friendship not just with Dylan Thomas, but with the other great poet from Swansea, Thomas's good friend, Vernon Watkins. Ormond had met Thomas and Watkins when he was a young man, had been influenced by their work, and shares with them a commitment to the craft of poetry and the longing, in a lovely, fragile world, for the permanent and transcendent. From one point of view, John Ormond's career as a poet has consisted largely of his finding his own distinctly articulated answers...