"There cannot be a Library of Wales volume more laden with poignancy.  With that terrible hindsight that comes with knowledge of his early death, pretty much everything the Cwmaman born poet and writer Alun Lewis penned is tinged with shadow, the sure knowledge that his writerly promise will be expunged.  Death hangs like a tropical musk in this green tree.  It came with a close-range shot to Lewis’s head, during the Burma campaign against the Japanese, the fateful revolver by his side.  What seemed like suicide was deemed to be an accident, a military tribunal deciding the man had tripped.  We shall never know the truth but reading the missives and tales is an act akin to reading Sylvia Plath’s fatidic poems, the lines seemingly seeping gas, or the late and final poems of mid Walian T Harri Jones, who hints at death by drowning, just before he drowns in the sea off New South Wales."