We are not wholly bad or good, who live our lives under Milk Wood.The voices of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood rise and fall, crashing into each other like waves under a milky moon, their sweet prose an effervescence of sounds and syllables to intoxicate the soul. This ‘play for voices’ follows the lives of the citizens of Milk Wood across a full day, bookmarked by the surrealistically sensational dream sequences of the two nights. The play simply engulfs you in its beautiful embrace, like the wa...

Omniscient hullabaloo, wickedly deep dwelling,Llareggub takes with panache, Dylan's verbal swelling,Part charade, part ribald, part delirium, A delightful parade in the alleys of quotidian.What else do you expect when the opening line is this helluva diva? To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobble streets silent and the hunched, courters' and rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fish...

I like Dylan Thomas for two reasons1. I grew up in Wales 2. I read his book Under Milk Wood when I was in school.Wales is a strange place to grow up. For a start you're told as a child that it's full of castles and dragons and daffodils and that there is evil over the border (England) and that Rugby is the one true sport. Some of those things are true. I'm sure even Dylan Thomas thought them from time to time. I lived outside Cardiff and Thomas was busily engaged in being Welsh in and around the...

I can honestly say that the world would be a lesser place if I had never read this play. It is not just that it is laugh-out-loud funny or that it is sad enough to make me weep - Captain Cat being forgotten by Rosie near the end is almost too painful to remember. But it is so full, so wonderfully overflowing with all the day to day concerns of life and love that it is a world in and of itself. Here is true creative genius.From husbands purchasing books on how to poison their wives to the terribl...

Originally written for BBC radio, the rise and fall of the voices are like the slow roll of the ocean. After reading it, I wished that I had opted for the audiobook. Under Milk Wood would be spectacular when read aloud.The setting is a Welsh fishing village just tucking in for the night. From the first line, the dreamy lyrical prose captured my imagination, painting a clear picture of the locale and its residents."To begin at the beginning:It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless...

"This town's as full as a lovebird's egg."- Dylan Thomas, Under Milk WoodThis book has languished on my shelf.Ignored.Left alone. I bought this book years ago. It was a deal. It was a steal. It was $2 at Goodwill. I recognized Dylan Thomas and knew it was a Folio edition. $2? Value? Done. I brought it home, put it on the shelf. Thought about it only narrowly. I figured it was a book of poetry. Poems. Fights against the dying of the light and whatnots. Nope. It is certainly poetic. Lyrical. Whims...

“Sundown dazzling day gold through my eyes but my eyes turned within only see starless and bible black…” King Crimson – Starless.Under Milk Wood has a texture of a lyrical myth so it is timeless…People sleep and they dream... People wake up and they play fools, dawdle, muck around, misbehave, recollect, fantasize and build castles in the air…“There's the clip clop of horses on the sun-honeyed cobbles of the humming streets, hammering of horse-shoes, gobble quack and cackle, tomtit twitter from t...

This just takes my breath away.The language. The evocation of time and place.The exquisite rhythm.I'm in love with this piece of work

Some works of literature just beg to be read out loud - This is the House that Jack Built and Hiawatha are two that most people are familiar with. Under Milk Wood too, is better appreciated read aloud. Try it for yourself. A sample (read aloud with Welsh accent, sing-song, go up like a question at the end of the line, extend vowels, as in 'weeedkiller' and emphasis is usually on the first syllable.)FIRST VOICEMr Pugh, in the School House opposite, takes up the morningtea to Mrs Pugh, and whisper...

I don't know Llarregub about many things, but I do know that Thomas's sloe black, crow black, boat-bobbing, poetic creation was one of the most enjoyable books I read in school.If you haven't yet acquainted yourself with his rich rhetoric and magical mischievousness, then please do!

Thomas's voices are like a tide that's rising and falling in spite of the reader's convenience at the time of the reading. Like a choir of ghosts ignorant of their unsubstantial nature. I swear they gave me the chills a number of times while I was reading it during my night shift, not because it was particularly scary but because of the everyday humour and grief that they were drenched in. Such darkness, such humour, such insolent irony in such a haunting combination I've rarely come across, if

I first listened to Dylan Thomas’ “play for voices” about 20 years ago, and have just done so again. On both occasions I listened to the 1954 BBC Radio Production, magnificently narrated by the orotund Richard Burton. It made a tremendous impression on me on the first occasion, and I’m not sure I could adjust to a different production.The play relates a day in the village of Llareggub, a name Thomas invented by reversing the letters of the expression “Bugger all”. The dead and the living seem to...

A smorgasbord of language. I am still blown away every time I read that first measured sentence, about the woodland ‘limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea’.If you only knew Dylan Thomas from his short poems (as I did before I read this) then prepare for a very pleasant shock. The wonderful rhythm of the lines here, the extraordinary creativity of compound words and unexpected similes, all sustained over a considerable distance, is something quit...

Drama, poetry or comedy?, how about all of them. Centering around one day in a small, unexceptional Welsh coastal town. We first meet those who recide at a point before dawn, the night "flying like black flour", as the reader drifts off through the dark fields and streets, through the bedrooms of the sleeping residents and into their dreams. From there we watch as they wake up and work, following them out of bed over this one day and then finally back into bed as night falls.The melodic and beau...

I remember the first time I came across Under Milk Wood, and it was when I was learning about imagery for my GCSEs. I fell in love with it - and, of course, with Richard Burton's beautiful First Voice.One joy of being an English teacher is teaching your favourite texts to someone new - which I'm pretty sure was what was happening to to me, the first time I was taught this. It wasn't on the syllabus.Another joy is that you can take playful, inventive, poetic language and give it to a kid who's in...

A quick listen at 1.5 hours. I enjoyed the rich language & the humor. It is by chance that this recording exists & I am thankful for the opportunity to hear it. Read 11/14/2011Update: we enjoyed the 1972 film version very much. The visualization brought an added depth of meaning to Dylan Thomas' wonderful words. 1/30/2022.

Not a play or a poem, exactly. This was written to be performed as a BBC radio drama, and it's about life in a sleepy town in Wales. We follow a few characters as they go from dream to wakefulness and then move through the rest of their day. We get to hear their thoughts and reflections as they do every day things. Sounds very dull, I know, which is why you have to read (or listen to) it for yourself.In the tradition of small towns (both fictional and nonfictional), everyone has a big secret. Ea...

Dylan Thomas originally intended this work to be radio play. However, my first experience of it was seeing the film adaptation narrated by Richard Burton, back when I was in high school in the 1970s. I remember two things about the experience: loving the sound of Richard Burton's voice, and feeling overwhelmed. This extract from the review in the New York Times goes some way to explaining my reaction: Too many words, perhaps, for the stage. Too many words, I'm convinced, for the screen. It's not...

I absolutely loved this radio play. It is a delicious peek into the lives of a sleepy Welsh fishing village and all the intrigues that go on in the peoples' lives. The book is great fun to read in a group but I would recommend you hear the audio version (with Richard Burton as one of the narrators) to get a true feel for the musicality and poetic beauty of this book.

If I could go back in time about 45 minutes ago and beat myself into a bloody, vegetative state, or at least into an illiterate delirium, so that I wouldn't have read this book, I would. If I could fit pliers into my ears so that I could rip out the sound of this play from my head forever, I would. If I could dig up Dylan Thomas' body and rig it with explosives and blow it up, making me blind from the concussion and so ensuring that I never accidentally read so much as a line of this again, beca...