“Book” Review: Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas
I didn’t expect anything from Under Milk Wood, except to perhaps and hopefully be reminded of Laugharne, and enjoy senses of it that I could recognise from living there as a zero to four year old (and going back to visit). The sad clang of the estuary boats, the salt mud smell, the shapes of the rock. I think the blue and pink icy swirl of slush puppies from The Spar was probably before his time but I can still feel that in my brain.
The first thing that struck me was how weird it is. Wonderfully Weird! It’s partly because it’s “a play for voices”– it moves around, creating moods and emotions rather than logically presenting narratives. To read it is to watch and listen. Zoom in and out of dream and wake, private and public, appreciate the unavoidable togetherness of place and time. And the language is so playful and lyrical that you can take in each experience fully and freshly.
“Sunhoneyed cobbles of the humming streets”
“wood limping down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea”
“now frying-pans spit, kettles and cats purr in the kitchens. The town smells of seaweed and breakfast”
“Spring whips green down cockle row and the shells ring out. Llareggub this snip of a morning is wildfruit and warm, the streets, fields, sands and waters springing in the young sun.
Evans the Death presses hard, with black gloves, on the coffin of his breast, in case his heart jumps out.”
I mean come on! I long to write like this. The sounds, the letters, the vividness, the melody! There is a lot of humour too.
“Letters with seals from men with voices like puddings are important. I must call a meeting.”
It really inspires me. To push past an initial temptation to choose a comfortable (acceptable?) group of words to describe a particular experience, that’s so specific, unique and bursting with context. I often think to myself, and say out loud to other people, “there’s no rules!” (not even grammatically correct is it lol). What I mean is, that they can and should be broken!
“and moss-slow and silent make their way uphill, from the still still sea”
“And the Reverend Jenkins hurries on through the town, to visit the sick with jelly and poems”
“Alone in the hissing laboratory of his wishes”
“The sunny slow lulling afternoon yawns and moons through the dozy town. The sea lolls, laps and idles in, with fishes sleeping in its lap. The meadows still as Sunday, the shut-eyed tasselled bulls, the goat-and-daisy dingles, nap happy and lazy. The dumb duck-ponds snooze”
“Clouds sag and pillow on Llareggub Hill. Pigs grunt in a wet wallow-bath, and smile as they snort and dream”
“Sly and silent, he foxes into his chemist’s den and there, in a hiss and prussic circle of cauldrons and phials brimful with pox and the Black Death, cooks up a fricassee of deadly nightshade, nicotine, hot frog, cyanide and bat-spit for his needling stalactite hag and bednag of a pockerbacked nutcracker wife.”
well fuck, mr pugh!
“The coming of the end of the Spring day is already reflected in the lakes of their great eyes.”
I’d better find a version to listen to!
