Book Description
“Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep”
Completed only a month before Dylan Thomas died, Under Milk Wood is an inspired and irreverent account of life and love in a small coastal village in Wales one spring day. Full of raucous energy and lyrical passion, it is the most complete expression of Thomas' unique perspective on the human condition.
Called “a play for voices” by the author himself, Under Milk Wood premiered in 1953 with Thomas and five American actors reading the parts and was preserved, almost by chance, in this remarkable recording. Here is the author's greatest work rendered as he himself directed, in his own famous voice that captures the lively melodic essence of the work itself.
Featuring Dylan Thomas with Sada Thompson, Nancy Wickwire, Ray Poole, Dion Allen, and Allen F. Collins
This is the only recording ever made with Thomas in the cast, and it owes its existence to the chance thought someone had just before curtain of setting up the little tape recorder that was at hand and laying a microphone on the floor at the center of the stage. Although a studio recording for Caedmon was planned, Thomas did not live to do it. That this recording was not erased or lost or thrown away remains some kind of miracle.
Customer Reviews:
Some memorable figures and a wonderful cast of characters.......2007-09-18
I recently read this while on vacation. The entire cast of characters is wonderful, wonderfully quirky, yet somehow very "normal". It is hard to describe genre-wise as it reads differently than how it was apparently intended - as a play for radio. But it works. A town of 500, with three quaint streets, a postman who reads the mail to all the (illiterate) inhabitants, my favorite couple in literature (Mr. and Mrs. Cherry Owen - she has two husbands, one drunk and one sober)and one of the most touching characters, Bessie Bighead, who was kissed once while not looking and never again despite looking... Fun!
"Time passes. Listen. Time passes.".......2005-06-01
Written as a "play for voices" for the BBC, this work was originally performed in 1954, with Richard Burton as the First Voice, connecting all thirty-three characters--men, women, and small children. Depicting one full day in the life of a small town in Wales, Thomas shows its motley residents as they awaken, perform their daily tasks, socialize and gossip, and daydream about the past that might have been and the future that may yet offer hope. As is always the case with Thomas, the "play" is full of alliteration and various kinds of rhyme, with nouns and adjectives used as verbs to convey action and sense impressions simultaneously. A wry humor and honesty of feeling make the work engaging for the listener/reader and charmingly illustrative of a time and place now gone.
Individual characters come alive through their own voices and through the gossip of others, spread by the postman and by neighbors. When night falls and the residents retire, their additional losses and disappointments, along with their escapes into dreams, are given voice and poignancy. Polly Garter, with her numerous children by numerous fathers, dreams of Willie Weasel, a very small man who was the love of her life. Captain Cat, the blind bell-ringer, thinks of all the sailors he knew who died at sea and Mr. Pugh dreams of poisoning his wife.
Simple songs add to the realism and the sense of character and place. An elegiac song by Polly Garter, as she remembers Willie and compares him to her other lovers, conveys an almost palpable sadness and makes Polly one of the most memorable characters. A humorous singing game by children adds to the realism, and young Gwenny's song to three very young boys is full of cheeky humor. Filled with the hurly-burly of everyday life in a small town in 1950s Wales, this and A Child's Christmas in Wales are among Thomas's most beloved works. Mary Whipple
starless and bible black & the sunny side of the street.......2003-12-02
I was first attracted to Dylan Thomas after studying James Joyce's The Dubliners at high school. I must say that in my opinion Thomas's play/poem makes a surprisingly good film, which is sadly not available thrugh Amazon.com, but to say this play for voices is delightful would be misleading, as this deep study of the underbelly of a small fishing village is about a peculiar kind of nationalism that is both celebratory and critical.
What makes it such a great experience is how the language grabs you, and you have to listen to every word, so it is intense. The narrator begins his description of the sleeping town of Llareggub from Milk Wood, above the town, then enters the cobbled streets to observe and eavesdrop, over a twenty-four hour period, dipping into the thoughts, reminiscences and dreams of the townsfolk.
Since Dylan Thomas died in 1953, and this was one of his last works, the world he describes is fifty years old and seems somewhat quaint today. But his rich language on occasions soars with the romance of feeling for the beauty of his nativeland (the vicar's morning address to the town, with nobody listening, is just wonderful), and love of its people.
Nevertheless, in relating the sexual dreams and fantasies and activities of the town and the world of men and women a touch of gothic intrudes. There are oppositions at play between the open-hearted, sexually generous women and the close-minded wives, the ecstatic Organ Morgan the church organist and his petty shopkeeper wife ("a martyr to music"), the mischievious butcher's subversions, numerous attractions and solicitations between adults and the budding sexuality of the young, the stultified love of Sinbad the barman, and an unscrupulous postman and his nosey-parker wife.And many other endearing characters.
The portrait Thomas paints of the town under Milk Wood is tainted by his own world-view, resentful of the Church, the lack of ambition and other provincialities. There's an amazing amount of activity in the town, apart from its economy, lots of drinking, sexuality and folksong, but despite the evidence of bad-blood the community seems to thrive on love and an underlying generosity of heart that allows for the bounty that all life brings.
These days I'm not a great lover of poetry, and that's what this play for voices is, but Under Milk Wood still works for me.
What ?.......2001-12-06
While I'm a long time fan of Dylan Thomas's prose and poetry, I've never understood the fascination with this sloppy, non-sensical play.
It is, to me, a moment when Thomas stopped being Thomas and made a clumsy attempt to emulate James Joyce. The result is a confusing and pointless play.
That said, the man was a marvel. Read his poetry, read "Adventures In The Skin Trade" and "Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog."
Something for everybody in Thomas' exquisite singsong dialog.......2001-09-20
I saw this play at the UW Drama School this spring, and it was by far the best play I'd seen all year -- so I ran right out and bought the hard copy to read. Could not put it down: and I just loved being swept away in the rhythmic current of Thomas' playful, wonderful river of speech. Satire and songs, cruelty and flirtation, dreams and ghosts, stirring eroticism and sweetness fertilize the highly alliterative and sensual text. The whole delightful, unforgettable short play makes a small Welsh fishing village seem like a living organism, where even the ground shifts and swells with the unspoken will of the long-dead and the presence of sea-captains now only legends. Get it on tape, if at all possible!
Average customer rating:
- A Christmas Tradition
- from a little bit of Wales comes universally human warmth...
- The voice
- a treasure
- It does not go gentle into that good night.
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A Child's Christmas In Wales CD: And Five Poems
Dylan Thomas
Manufacturer: Caedmon
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Similar Items:
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A Child's Christmas in Wales
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Dylan Thomas:The Caedmon CD Collection
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A Christmas Memory
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A Child's Christmas in Wales (Godine Storyteller)
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Christmas Day in the Morning
ASIN: 0060514671
Release Date: 2002-11-12 |
Book Description
First recorded in February of 1952, this remastered recording of Dylan Thomas reading his A Child's Christmas in Wales recalls all of the sights, smells, and sounds of a long-ago-Christmas.
Thomas's wonderful recollection of this holiday in the seaside town of his youth is captured in this vivid performance. Also included are five other selected poems read by Dylan Thomas, including his well-known Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.
Whether sharing his wistful memory of a holiday spent with people long past, or addressing the perennial problem of our mortality, Thomas gives us great pleasure in our personal and common memories while affirming life with a resounding "Yes!"
Contents:
A Child's Christmas in Wales
And five poems: Fern Hill; Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night; In The White Giant's Thigh; Balad of the Long-Legged Bait; Ceremony After a Fire Raid
Customer Reviews:
A Christmas Tradition.......2007-01-10
This reading of A Child's Christmas in Wales is tops! It wouldn't be Christmas for us without hearing Dylan Thomas tell his story. He recounts a holiday of simple, family and neighborhood doings, and paints a picture of snowy, seaside Wales of the 1920's.
from a little bit of Wales comes universally human warmth..........2007-01-05
I love this story, as do all my children, who, from their earliest years, have not much struggled with the density of the language nor the scatteredness of the story. 5 of my 8 great-grandparents are from Wales, and the remaining 3 have the blood in them as well, so maybe it is like drinking water for us.:-D Our minds are all scattered, and words, even English words ;-D, fall on us in clumps....which makes it doubly hard to keep a clean house. LOL
The sort of prose-poetry imaginative way of seeing and describing the world unique to Welshwomen and Welshmen and Welshchildren, which does not seek to keep up the pretense that history can be separated from myth, story and desire, and which requires loving with eyes wide open to [and eventually embracing] one's own and others' bumps, bruises and idiosyncracies included, is extraordinarily well represented here. So, by the way, is speaking and listening to the close and Holy darkness!
My favorite version isthe one illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman. To me she has captured the complexity of the Welsh personality best, though i have nothing to say against the other illustrators praised in these reviews. I DO have a warning for you: there are some skinny versions flying about which do not have the poem-story complete and correct. This sort of work cannot suffer removal or modification, IMHO.
gbg
The voice.......2006-03-24
If you have read A Child's Christmas in Wales, you know that it has to be a classic. But you can't fully appreciate it until you have heard Dylan Thomas read it. What a deep, expressive, poetic voice. For years, I have listened to the recording on a Caedman record. It is wonderful to have it on a CD.
a treasure.......2005-12-28
For me, "A Child's Christmas in Wales" is the single most beautiful piece of Christmas literature in the English language.
And once you hear the author himself reading it, you will be forever enchanted. Dylan Thomas' deep humanity is expressed in every word, and in the spaces between them, in this masterpiece.
DB
It does not go gentle into that good night........2005-09-25
Like so many other children's books, Amazon.com takes a perverse pleasure in lumping together all version's of Dylan Thomas's, "A Child's Christmas In Wales". So if a reviewer, like myself, wants to review the book that was illustrated in 2004 by Chris Raschka, I'd better make it as clear as possible right from the start. So here it goes. Ahem. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it gives me the greatest of pleasure to announce that I will now be reviewing "A Child's Christmas In Wales", penned by the great Dylan Thomas and illustrated with grace, aplomb, and a hint of frenzy by accomplished children's book illustrator Chris Raschka. Thank you.
If you, like myself, have gone most of your natural life in ignorance of this story, I'll try to summarize it here. Problem is, summarizing "A Child's Christmas In Wales" is akin to herding cats. This isn't one of those books with a neat little beginning, middle, and end. There's not what you might call "a plot". If the book is ever summarized anywhere it's simply stated that this is Thomas's reminisces of Christmas when he was a child. In doing so, the poet fills this relatively short work with patches of memory, amazing descriptions, and evocative sentences like, "The wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves". If you're looking for a straightforward Christmas tale with characters, a plot, and a point, go get yourself a copy of "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" and enjoy it. If, on the other hand, you would like to begin a tradition in your family of reading aloud this magnificent and truly beautiful collection of evocative images, this the only place to go.
There is no tradition in my family of listening or reading this story during the holiday time of year. In fact, prior to reading this book with Raschka's illustrations, I had never even heard so much as a phrase from it. Basically I came to this book as a clean slate. I was just a former college English major with some mild associations with Dylan but certainly no baggage of any kind. Not knowing the history behind the book, I was under the vague and misguided belief that Dylan had written this tale with the full intent that it be a children's book. Not so much. According to the helpful Foreward at the beginning of this tale, I learned that this book was actually a combination of two separate pieces produced during Thomas's lifetime and put together after. So this isn't like when Michael Chabon or Joyce Carol Oates writes a children's book. More like when Woody Guthrie songs are turned into picture books. A posthumous and lucrative printing.
For the child that has never heard this story read before, I found that Raschka was a perfect fit. Certainly I understand that the book has, in the past, been illustrated by the great Trina Schart Hyman. Hyman, however, is a very literal illustrator. She's excellent at realism and intricate characters, but how well does that work when she's paired with Mr. Thomas? This is a book that contains lines like, "All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find". Hyman doesn't even bother to deal with sentences like that one. Raschka is another matter entirely. Using a gouache, ink, and torn paper technique, the man who brought the world the manic, "John Coltrane's Giant Steps" has finally met his authorial match. The sentence I just wrote above is accompanied by a snowblown seaside town, so filled with cresting waves and freezing snow that you shiver just looking at it. These are pictures that work on the reader's emotions. I have all the respect in the world for Hyman or even Edward Ardizzone, but as accomplished as they are, they're not the right fit. Raschka is.
I was a little baffled by the blurb on the cover of this version of the tale that read, "This beautifully illustrated edition should bring Dylan Thomas's work to a new generation of children" - President Jimmy Carter. I'm a Carter fan myself, but even I can't see what this perfectly nice former president has to do with poetry, children's literature, or even Christmas itself. It might have been better to put a blurb by the Number 1 poet in America. Problem is, who is that person? And would anyone buy a book if they recommended it? These problems aside, it's wonderful for me to hold this book in my hands and know that at long last a great problem has been corrected. Thomas's book has existed for years without proper packaging. Raschka single-handedly has corrected this problem and the world is a better place for it. So thank you, Mr. Raschka. Thank you.
Product Description
This is one of Ardizzone's last books, and in our mind one of his best; a gentle and beguiling memoir of a Christmas spent in Cardiff when Thomas was a child. Ardizzone's quick, sure brushwork is not only the perfect complement to a timeless classic but a wonderful evocation of a gentle and seemingly endless Christmas in a faraway land made charming and endearing through language.
Customer Reviews:
More than a Christmas story........1997-10-22
Scaring sleeping uncles by popping balloons. Getting a hatchet by mistake. Snowballing cats. Dylan Thomas has captured the perfect Christmas. Without any moral, very little plot, and a concern only for the child's perspective, this little piece sticks in my mind better than any other Christmas story I've ever read. Between drunk Auntie Hannah singing in the backyard and the haunted house down the streets where a group of mischievous carollers get the living hell scared out of them, "A Child's Christmas in Wales" is everything Christmas should be: funny, happy, poignant, a little sad, and fattening. Keep a bowl of candy nearby when you read it.
Average customer rating:
- And the knock of sailing boats on the net-webbed wall
- Exquisite photos, poems, letters in one gorgeous volume
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Dylan Thomas' Wales
Hilary Laurie
Manufacturer: Sterling
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0297824813 |
Book Description
Dylan Thomas returned time and again in his verse to Wales, particularly the area around Laugharne, which gave rise to his most famous verse play, Under Milk Wood. Come to know the Welsh towns and countryside that were his home and inspiration, with Hilary Laurie, the editor in charge of his estate, as your guide. The writer's haunts include Cwmdonkin Park opposite his parents' house in Swansea; his aunt's farm at Fernhill; the long, curving shore at Rhossili on the Gower peninsula; and the fields and farms around Llanstephan, where his mother's relatives lived. The color and black-and-white photographs show the places he loved, as well as Thomas himself--as a young boy posing in a photographer's studio with his mother, sister, and a family friend, preparing for a radio broadcast. A vivid sense of the man and the country he was so passionate about is conveyed in this book. 160 pages, 60 color illus., 40 b/w illus., 7 3/8 x 9 3/4.
Customer Reviews:
And the knock of sailing boats on the net-webbed wall.......2001-04-01
Hilary Laurie's pictorial biography is a worthy successor to John Ackerman's "Welsh Dylan", a book we first encountered in the middle 1980s. Laurie's book, "Dylan Thomas's Wales," combines colour photographs of modern-day Wales with old black-and-whites of Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, Dylan's parents and children; the text is an accurate chronicle of the poet's life, from schoolboy mischief to the turbulence of his more famous years. Laurie's tone toward her subject is one of deep respect, with a keen eye to Thomas's faults (usually described by Thomas himself, in the letters which Laurie excerpts).
There is, as there must be, a generous sampling of some of Dylan Thomas's more famous poems, the lines that echo in the brain and heart for twenty decades after you've read them. Occasionally, the texts of the poems are almost undetectably inaccurate, a plural noun made singular or a definite article omitted, but these objections aside, Laurie has done a fantastic job in making the life of Dylan Thomas quite vivid, and in giving American readers a fairly good visual impression of the landscape in which Thomas was immersed.
A photograph from "Welsh Dylan" (Ackerman's book) that might have been included is that of the club-wielding chalk giant, etched into the hill of Cerne Abbas, a landmark that inspired Dylan Thomas's poem "In the White Giant's Thigh." But that photograph of a youthful Mrs Thomas clutching the hay to conceal her birthdaysuitedness (p 79) might be, for some, apt compensation.
Exquisite photos, poems, letters in one gorgeous volume.......2000-12-30
I have never been able to see the exact places that Dylan Thomas wrote about, so this book was very meaningful to me. I didn't expect to see Caitlin Thomas in a field dressed only in hay, but she's here, too. Especially touching is a photo of Dylan with Pamela Hansford Johnson. They look happy, but the caption reads: "This visit convinced her of the hopelessness of their relationship."
The text is part biography, part letters, part poems. Photos of places he lived, walked, played. Probably over a hundred photos in the book, most of which this Dylan Thomas addict had never seen.
Average customer rating:
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Caitlin: Life With Dylan Thomas
Caitlin Thomas , and
George Tremlett
Manufacturer: Henry Holt & Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 080500369X |
Customer Reviews:
Outstanding Memoir.......2002-04-02
This memoir is painful, beautiful, rugged. He shows himself to be proud, horrid, loving, sentimental. It is a small collection of short, powerful stories that span from childhood to young adulthood. He refers to himself at times in first person, other times in third (so you have to pay attention!). Growing into manhood, observing others and being observed. He expresses experiences of personal pride and humiliation with equal relish. Portraits of others in his life are humorous, admiring and at times sad. Hanging out with odd-balls; learning about women. It may have been a simpler time for technology, but the emotional struggles, the economic realities, the physical exertion required in a life in early 20th century Wales were harsh. All-in-all, this book is unforgettable.
Too good to be ignored.......2000-03-06
I would rather read this book than any by James Joyce. Thomas may be remembered for his wonderful poems, but his short pieces are, under no circumstances, to be ignored.
Thomas writes of his youth, which is a subject that many writers have attempted to write about, and where they fall short he excells. The stories are nothing but fun. Actually, they are more than fun; they are often beautiful. By all means, READ THIS!
Different and cool........1998-12-21
It's been a while since I read this book, but I wanted to be the first one to review!! The book was filled with small excerpts from Dylan Thomas' life, many of which dealt with surreal type encounters. The first part of the book seemed to lag somewhat, but the last story got me hooked and then ended in a very odd way, which was really cool. Maybe I shouldn't be writing this, I'm no lit expert. I'd reccommend it though.
Average customer rating:
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Dylan Thomas: Craft or Sullen Art (Critical Studies Series)
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0312035721 |
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A Child's Christmas in Wales: Christmas Musical
Dylan Thomas
Manufacturer: Dramatic Pub Co
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0871293757 |
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The Poems of Dylan Thomas, New Revised Edition [with CD]
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