This audio collection contains Dylan Thomas’s play Under Milk Wood along with several of his poems and short stories. Under Milk Wood is read by a full cast headed by Richard Burton, and the poems and short stories represent recordings by modern actors as well as historic ones by Dylan Thomas himself.

This was my second go at Under Milk Wood (the first time was purely textual reading) and I’m not quite sure what to make of it. It’s definitely beautifully written with such a lyrical style, although it’s probably one of the least plotted plays I’ve ever read or seen. Dylan Thomas called it “a play for voices” and it’s more about hearing language spoken than anything else. The play follows the lives of various people in a small Welsh town, starting with their morning dreams and ending at that night. Mostly, we are just hearing what people are remembering from their past, what gossip is going around, etc. There is very little action, which makes me wonder how this play would actually work in production. (I’ve occasionally heard of Under Milk Wood being put on by such-and-such theater but never anywhere in my area.) The audio version was actually a bit hard to follow at first, so I took out my text copy and followed along until I got into the rhythm of it. Still, like I said above, I’m not sure what to make of it and that’s the reason I give this audio collection an only so-so rating.

The short stories and poems were all amazing. I’m not the hugest fans of short stories as a general rule because I always find their endings a bit abrupt and that was still the case here, but they were so wonderfully rich in language that I thoroughly enjoyed them. Dylan Thomas was an extraordinarily talented writer, and I’ll be sure to read other works by him in the future. ( )