Dylan the Bard by Andrew Sinclair (Constable & Robinson, £7.99)

TO begin at the beginning. Dylan Marlais Thomas was born on October 27, 1914, at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in the "splendidly ugly sea town" of Swansea.

He died in New York on November 9, 1953, during a lecture tour in which he kept the adreneline pumped on a deadly mixture of alcohol, sleeping pills, benzedrine, phenobarbitone and atropine; when he blacked out he was brought around with cortisone and morphine.

After a final reading of Under Milk Wood, Thomas collapsed, turned blue and slipped into a coma from which he never recovered.

Those all too short 39 years between, witnessed Dylan Thomas's rise as the greatest lyrical poet of the age with booze his ever faithful sidekick, though as his wife Caitlin once recounted: "He drank as a woman might be promiscuous."

Thomas's drinking was legendary, from his early days in London, where he was befriended by the likes of Stephen Spender and Augustus John - Caitlin had been the rou's mistress when they met - to the final heady days at Laugherne, where Brown's Hotel became a second home to The Boat House, to which disciples are now drawn.

It is both anexhuberant and tragic tale that Sinclair tells. A life that began with so much promise and ended in such tragic circumstances.

Here was the boy who forced his way under the wire to get into Cwmdonkin Park, and there let his imagination take him to places "full of terrors and treasures... as many secret places, caverns and forests, prairies and deserts, as a country somewhere at the end of the sea".

The teenager who become a copy boy/reporter on the South Wales Daily Post - a job for which surprisingly he was not suited (he couldn't be bothered to learn shorthand and famously filed the result of a court story omitting the essential word 'not'.)

The legend of the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive rose first through poetry, then prose, broadcasts and finally filmscripts.

But more than anything it is the enduring popularity of Under Milk Wood that preserves his fame and his Welshness... though Sinclair points out that his native wet Wales was a place where he often felt "so utterly and suicidally morbid".

Sinclair offers a man who loved to shock, wound and to strike out. A man of self-deprication "think blubber lips; snub nose; curly mousebrown hair; one front tooth broken".

But above all that, Thomas never doubted he was born to be a poet. Words were always his delight, loving them for their sound before he understood their meaning.

There was humour too - witness the backwards interpretation of his mythical Llaregyb.

Life was never easy with Dylan Thomas, but he had one monstrous saving grace - a gargantuan gift of the gab. David Chapman