In today’s news roundups, we bring you the stories about the War Poetry Collection of Dean F. Echenberg  as it finally heads off to its new home and a Dylan Thomas inspired Snug which has also found a new home in a pub in Waterloo.

Poetry Collection Heads to its New Home

Poetry has always been a popular medium for expressing and capturing the feeling and emotions of war. Harry Ransom’s Centre at Texas University in Austin, has recently been given the opportunity to make a significant increase to its collection of war poetry.

The War Poetry Collection of Dean F. Echenberg  contains a huge number of poems, written by both men and women from many different countries and in a number of different languages. The collection which contains poems by established poets and non-professional writers alike was collected by a man named Dean Echenberg. He began putting the collection together in the 1970’s following his time in the Vietnam war, where he worked as a flight surgeon. He later went on to become the director for disease control in San Francisco.

Once the collection has been fully catalogued by its new owners it is expected that the collection of over 6500 volumes will be available for research and teaching purposes.

The Harry Ransom Centre already has a superb collection of wartime poetry which includes poems by the World War I poets Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon. Echenberg’s War Poetry Collection will add any noteworthy pieces including a rare first prin of Robert Graves’

as well as more contemporary works by Dunya Mikgail and Kevin Powers. There are also some English language translations of works by Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Echenberg had been considering a number of potential new home for his collection before deciding on the Ransom Centre which he believes will be the best home for the collection.

Now You Too Can Drink in The Dylan Thomas Inspired Snug

In 2014, as part of the centenary celebrations of the birth of the poet Dylan Thomas a replica of a 1920’s – 1930’s Swansea bar was put together as part of an exhibition celebrating the Swansea Thomas would have lived in.

Following the exhibition, the life-sized Snug, which had been put together by architectural salvage experts, using period materials was put into storage.

Now the snug has been dusted off and installed in a permanent new home in London’s Waterloo. The Mc and Sons is a family run business and the heritage of the snug was important to them; Thomas’ wife Caitlin had links to Ireland.

It seems somehow fitting that the snug should end up I Waterloo as the area had a special connection to the poet; it is here he met and romanced the American journalist and literary critic Pearl Kazin who ultimately became his mistress. It was this relationship that eventually led to the breakup of the poet’s marriage.