Thomas, Dylan

Dylan Thomas: The Caedmon Collection

Beginning in February 1952, Dylan Thomas made a series of memorable and historic recordings for a new record label called Caedmon. In fact, Dylan Thomas was the first to record for this new label, started by two 22–year–old women, Marianne Roney and Barbara Cohen. Little did they know that in addition to capturing a part of history they also launched an industry of spoken–word recording.

This collection not only contains the incredible Caedmon recording sessions, but also recordings from the BBC, CBC, and other archival material Caedmon originally published in the 1950s and 1960s.

Highlights include: "A Child's Christmas in Wales" and "Five Poems"; "Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night", his prose: Adventures in the Skin Trade and Quite Early One Morning, and his final work – Under Milk Wood, a play.

With stunning original album cover art, and an introduction read by former poet laureate Billy Collins, this unique collection includes not only Dylan Thomas reading his finest works, but also rare recordings of Thomas reading his favorite writers, including W.H. Auden and William Shakespeare.

The Poems of Dylan Thomas, New Revised Edition [with CD]

The most complete edition of the works of one of the twentieth century's greatest poets.

This new, revised edition of The Poems of Dylan Thomas is based on the collection edited by Thomas's life-long friend and fellow poet, Daniel Jones, first published by New Directions in 1971. Jones started with the ninety poems Thomas selected for his Collected Poems in 1952 (at a time when the poet expected that many years of work still lay ahead of him) and, after exhaustive research and consideration, added one hundred previously finished, though uncollected, poems (including twenty-six juvenile works), and two unfinished poems, and arranged them all in chronological order of composition, creating the most complete edition of Thomas's poems ever published.

This revised edition contains all the original material and incorporates textual corrections. Also included are an Introduction and concise notes by Daniel Jones, a brief chronology of the poet's life, and a compact disc containing vintage recordings of Thomas reading eight of his poems in his famous "Welsh-singing" style, making this edition of The Poems of Dylan Thomas a truly remarkable collection.

Selected Poems 1934-1952, New Revised Edition

A classic New Directions book—revised for the 21st Century.

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) prepared this volume in 1952—the author's choice of the ninety poems he felt would best represent his work up to that time—and it was published by New Directions in 1953 as The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, shortly after his death. This book was then and remained, for all practical purposes, Thomas's "collected" poems and in that sense complete. However, with the 1971 publication of the 192 poems in The Poems of Dylan Thomas (also now available in a revised edition), Thomas's Collected Poems has naturally evolved to become Thomas's Selected Poems.

Thomas wrote his last poem, "Prologue," especially to begin this collection, and addressed it to "my readers, the strangers." Two unfinished poems are included in this edition: "Elegy," prepared by Vernon Watkins, and "In Country Heaven," prepared by Daniel Jones—both Welsh poets were life-long friends of Dylan Thomas. Textual corrections discovered over the course of forty years have now been incorporated, and a complete index of titles and first lines, as well as a brief chronology of the author's life, have been added.

As it has for half a century, this book includes the best of Dylan Thomas's poetry—"Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines," "The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower," "And Death Shall Have No Dominion," "Poem in October," "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night," "The Hunchback in the Park," "In My Craft or Sullen Art," "In Country Sleep," and Thomas's poignant reflection on his youth, "Fern Hill."

Under Milk Wood and other plays (Classic Drama)

Under Milk Wood is Dylan Thomass undisputed and unforgettable masterpiece an affectionate, but hilarious portrait of a small Welsh town. The classic 1954 recording, featuring a perfect cast led by Richard Burton as First Voice, is rightly considered to be definitive. This collection also includes two earlier radio programmes: Return Journey to Swansea and Quite Early One Morning, read by Dylan Thomas and others. Enjoyable in their own right, they also provide a fascinating insight into the process that led towards Under Milk Wood.

Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas 1934-1952 (New Directions Book)

Dylan Thomas's poems gambol and frisk across the tongue and imagination like those of few poets I have ever read. His choicely crafted (and often synaesthetic) phrases, his musicality, and his laughingly lilting language are nicely captured by the first two stanzas of Fern Hill--read it aloud for full effect:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honored among wagons I was prince of the apple towns,
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams...

This collection of his poems contains only those pieces he wished preserved and should be owned by anyone who loves beautifully crafted language.

Quite Early One Morning

Dylan Thomas Reads a Child's Christmas in Wales and Five Poems/Cd

A Child's Christmas in Wales is the nostalgic recollection of Dylan Thomas' childhood that has become a classic among Christmas tales. With powerful grace, Thomas performs this renowned work, along with five of his most well-known poems. Features: A Child's Christmas in Wales Fern Hill Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night In the White Giant's Thigh Ballad of the Long-legged Bait Ceremony After a Fire Raid.

The Love Letters of Dylan Thomas

The beauty and power of Dylan Thomas’s voice are captured here in a stunning collection of letters to his wife Caitlin, as well as his various lovers and close female friends. With a style as grand and lyrical as his poetry, Thomas expresses his affection in letters that are sensual, uninhibited, romantic, funny and always loving.

The Love Letters of Dylan Thomas is a look at Dylan Thomas as a poet and as a man. The letters portray details of Thomas’s personal life, showing him at his most open and passionate. At the same time, the brilliance of his words represents the breadth of his talent and the power of the lost art of letter-writing. This book is a tribute to the art of Dylan Thomas and an inspiration to lovers, poets and writers everywhere.


“I love you more than anybody in the world. And yesterday-though it may be lots of yesterdays ago to you when this wobbly letter reaches you-was the best day in the world in spite of dogs, and Augustus woofing, and being miserable because it had to stop. I love you for millions and millions of things, clocks and vampires and dirty nails and squiggly paintings and lovely hair and being dizzy and falling dreams.”
-from a letter to his wife, Caitlin

More Dylan Thomas Reads: Adventures in the Skin Trade / Quite Early One Morning / and Other Poems

Adventures in the Skin Trade

Quite Early One Morning

and Other Peoms

Remastered from the original BBC broadcast recordings the stories of Dylan Thomas presented here are wild and sweet and cocky--as the man and child were. His technique is impressionistic, piling on the sights and smells and sounds experience by one rough-and-tumble Welsh lad with miraculous awareness of the wonder of things. Throughout his short life, Dylan Thomas dipped continually into his own childhood for his poetry.

Thomas' hilarious, semi-autobiographical novel Adventures in the Skin Trade about a young man's first trip to the big city was recorded at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street YM-YWHA in New York City.

This audio reproduces the full sound spectrum of the historic recordings; it has been remastered using contemprary digital equipment.

 

Under Milkwood

“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.