For a world drunk on a cocktail of cyber-irony – millennial fever mixed with a distrust of history and nostalgia – the poetry of the first half of this century has become a large and sluggish target. Caught in the no-man’s-land between the bottom-line expectations of the vox populi and those postmodern theorists who believe any search for meaning is a mug’s game, poets like Dylan Thomas, who until the 1980s were part of every liberal curriculum, are now often unceremoniously silenced. With reputations seeming bloated by the convenient legacy of over-analysis, they’re relegated to a poetic abyss. Caitlin Thomas’s posthumous memoir, Double Drink Story, is the perfect cure for this critical hangover: a little hair-of-the-dog that’s bit us.

Everything it should be, Thomas’s anecdotal history has a clearly defined focus. It is about alcoholism, the romantic myths and realities of creative genius, and Dylan Thomas. It’s about how, for Caitlin, any discussion of one was necessarily inextricably wed to the others. Published three years after her death, and more than 11 years after she co-wrote the ground-breaking Caitlin: Life with Dylan Thomas, this book is both extremely personal and impressionistic – a brutal reconstruction of abject self-degradation and the slipshod art of slow liquid suicide.

In describing how she and Dylan considered themselves “the chosen,” alcoholics who believed that “the immortality of [their] love” and talent justified every indulgence, Caitlin Thomas creates a terrifyingly real analogue to the fictional hell of works like Leaving Las Vegas and Trainspotting. Her wonderfully ecstatic prose dances with madness, desperation, and intoxication, ultimately staying just this side of sober narrative propriety in order to weave a mesmerizing parable that entertains as it instructs. Writing long after Alcoholics Anonymous helped her to control her addiction and learn to live with its ever-present spectre, Thomas manages to revisit all the violence, narcissism, and sexual and emotional betrayal of her alcohol-soaked life with her husband.

Caitlin Thomas’s story is, in the end, an uncompromising search for a “truth” that could have drowned forever in its own sorrow. Instead, because of this search, Dylan Thomas, the poet who shared both Caitlin’s bed and disease, becomes an even more tragic, charming, and culturally relevant contemporary.