Synopsis
Milk Wood Memoir, the fourth collection by Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, opens with a handful of family recollections of Dylan Thomas, including Samantha’s grandfather’s presence in the poet’s house on the night he was shot at in March 1945. Thomas’s wartime sojourn in New Quay in West Wales from 1944 to 1945 was one of the most important creative periods in his life. Many scholars have linked the small coastal town to the imagined Llareggub (buggerall) in which Thomas set his most famous work, Under Milk Wood.
New Quay’s present-day poet-resident, Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, takes up the baton of the guide who never made it into the final version of Thomas’s play, showing us around her hometown through the eyes of its inhabitants past and present. In a series of eco-elegies, she explores how the wood of Under Milk Wood is turning into a floating forest due to coastal erosion. The paths once walked by Dylan Thomas between his bungalow and the pubs of New Quay are slowly collapsing into the sea, taking with them both trees and houses.
As the guide takes us along the path she points out moments and monuments, all the while relating various ‘hanes’ (pronounced ha-ness, a Welsh word for stories, gossip) relating to local characters, a sort of family lore handed down the generations. Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch takes us by the hand and shows us the joys and sadnesses, excitements and fears behind the doors of the town she believes is key to Under Milk Wood.
‘Wynne-Rhydderch’s poetry masters a variety of styles, is intelligent, sincere, and deeply human. How lucky we are to have a guide like her’ – Matthew Dickman
Details
07 May 2026
9781035091072Reviews
Wynne-Rhydderch’s poetry masters a variety of styles, is intelligent, sincere, and deeply human. How lucky we are to have a guide like her
The sea pulls at the roots of this remarkable collection, from its coastline’s tilted houses and trees to Wynne-Rhydderch’s ancestral Milk Wood cast, her ‘lively tribe’, chronicled here with such precision and tenderness they already feel part of Welsh folklore, articulating the wit and quiet heroism of a lost generation. This is a haunting work from a unique voice in contemporary poetry.
Milk Wood Memoir is a tender and beautiful evocation of a seaside community. With its rich blend of history and mythology, the book draws on over a century of family and social memory. Setting off in the key of Dylan Thomas, who was shot in Ceredigion’s exotic New Quay these poems modulate into Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch’s distinctively crisp, humorous and poignant metaphysical register. The book’s subject is deep time and how we’re all immersed in it together. Surrealism is a realistic way of describing deaths and sorrows, from an inherited tortoise to the poet’s own father on his deathbed. A delight from start to finish. Pitch-perfect.
