The Essential Dylan Thomas

Parts 1 & 2: Historical Recordings

Under Milk Wood – the legendary historical performance with Richard Burton and cast • Quite Early One Morning • Return Journey to Swansea • Poems and stories read by Dylan Thomas

Parts 3 & 4: New Recordings

Read by Philip Madoc, Richard Bebb and Jason Hughes

Selected Poems including Fern Hill • Do Not Go Gentle • Poem in October • Selected Stores including The Outing • Peaches • Visit to Grandpa • The Fight • And Death Shall Have No Dominion

This varied, well-chosen selection brings onto one CD set the best of Dylan Thomas. Here is the legendary recording of Under Milk Wood, with Richard Burton and Richard Bebb as narrators; but here also are two radio productions he wrote before that great classic, and though interesting in their own right, they show how Under Milk Wood grew gradually in his imagination.

Thomas was a charismatic if idiosyncratic performer of his own poetry and stories and here is a representative selection.

But performances of Dylan Thomas have moved on and the greatness of the writer as a poet and storyteller are perhaps best heard in new recordings by actors of our own time. Here Bebb. Madoc and Hughes share some of Thomas finest, most challenging and endearing works.