Books with title Under Milk Wood

Internationally acclaimed for its eccentricity and adored for its lovelorn lyricism, Dylan Thomas’s groundbreaking 1954 "play for voices," Under Milk Wood, has long echoed in the imagination of the founding father of British Pop Art, Sir Peter Blake. An obsession that has spanned almost thirty years, this "greenleaved sermon on the innocence of men" has filled the spaces of Blake’s studio, played and replayed on broadcast recordings, and prompted several pilgrimages to Thomas’s creative refuge at Laugharne, Carmarthenshire. All is "strangely simple and simply strange" in the sleepy Welsh seaside town of Llareggub, as the dreams, fantasies and realities of the inhabitants unfold across the cycle of one spring day. At once a lively and humorous depiction of the butchers, bakers, preachers and children, of Captain Cat, Nogood Boyo and Polly Garter – with a ribaldry in which Blake delights – it is also a modern pastoral tale on a Chaucerian scale, a quest for innocence and purity of utterance in a "darkest-before-dawn" world. Revealed here for the very first time with the definitive play text are the "dismays and rainbows" of this great artist’s richly detailed sequences of 110 watercolors, pencil portraits and collages, comprising one of his most distinctive and significant single bodies of work.

“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. CollinsThis 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.

Here, in the masterpiece completed just before his death in 1953, Dylan Thomas gave fullest expression to his sense of the magnificent flavor and variety of life. A moving and hilarious account of a spring day in a small Welsh coast town, Under Milk Wood begins with dreams and ghosts before dawn, moves through the brilliant, noisy day of the townspeople and closes as the "rain of dusk brings on the bawdy night."

Audio Cassette Format. Newman Books on Cassette, 2 audio cassette set. Item no. 20013. Unabridged; total playing time: 1 hour, 29 minutes. Under Milk Wood is perhaps Dylan Thomas's most famous work. Here is a day in the life of a Welsh fishing village. Written as a "play for voices," this version was originally broadcast on the BBC Radio. Richard Burton leads a large cast. Burton had one of the best voices in England and was a superb performer.

In 1951, two years before his death, Dylan Thomas wrote of his plan to complete a radio play, 'an impression for voices, an entertainment out of the darkness, of the town I live in, and to write it simply and warmly and comically with lots of movement and varieties of moods, so that, at many levels...you come to know the town as an inhabitant of it'. The work was UNDER MILK WOOD - an orchestration of voices, sights and sounds that conjure up the dreams and waking hours of an imagined Welsh seaside village within the cycle of one day. Includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism and chronology of Thomas's life and times.