Poetry review – MILK WOOD MEMOIR: Michael Bartholomew-Biggs is charmed by Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch’s poetic exploration of the lives and times of real and imagined inhabitants of a Welsh coastal town
Milk Wood Memoir
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
Picador Poetry
ISBN 978-103509 1072
£12.99
Sometimes all the ingredients of a book seem to fall magically into place. A poet lights upon a theme for a collection which proves to contain a rich seam of stories – both factual and fanciful – and which so captures their attention and affections that it draws deeply on their capacity for imaginative language, colourful metaphor, and simple playfulness. After that it only remains for the book to be discovered by a reader who can appreciate the authenticity yet still enjoy the author’s own inventive ways of shaping and enhancing it.
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch’s new collection Milk Wood Memoir is set in the Welsh seaside village of New Quay and explores its connection with Dylan Thomas and his famous radio “play for voices”, Under Milk Wood. It’s not clear how much of an overlap there is between New Quay and the fictional village of Llareggub. It is certain however that Dylan Thomas lived in New Quay during the early 1940s and so it is likely that he imported at least some of its features and people into his plotting.
Wynne-Rhydderch approaches the present-day village and its current inhabitants in much the same way that Dylan Thomas handled his location and cast of characters. She writes with humour and tenderness and a strong sense of how lives are shaped by the history and geography of a place – particularly the proximity of and dependence on the sea. New Quay and its surrounding woodlands are in fact slowly collapsing into the sea. If these solid physical features can disappear then how can we be sure of the boundaries between what’s real and what’s fanciful or between what is happening now and what is anchored in the past?
Dylan Thomas himself appears as a character in the early poems. “Aubade” portrays him on an early morning walk with ‘only his characters for company’; and it also gives us, the readers, a first glimpses of New Quay as a ‘jigsaw /of slate roofs and allotments … Think Sicily // with rain.’ Thomas only lived in New Quay for about nine months. In September 1944 he and his wife Caitlin, along with their two children, Llewelyn and Aeronwy, left London to escape the new danger from flying bomb attacks. The poem “Pram” records how, whenever it ‘squeaked past his house’, Aeronwy’s Silver Cross baby carriage ‘doubled as a drinks trolley’ to fortify Thomas and Wynne-Rhydderch’s grandfather on the walks they sometimes took together. A more dramatic incident lies behind “The Shooting of Dylan Thomas 6th March 1945”. The story begins in the local pub where a resident, Captain Killick, home on leave from active service, is disturbed when ‘in from the Blackout blew a curly-headed bloke / with two film people in tow’. This may lead us to suppose that any ‘shooting’ is going to turn out to be merely cinematography; but Killick has sized up Thomas as a ‘misfit dodging the war’ and become so enraged that he later fetches his Sten gun and takes a pot shot through Thomas’s window. Luckily no harm is done because everyone inside was
sitting on the floor when
bullets zipped through the kitchen wall
and lodged in the bathroom door.
Unsurprisingly, Thomas and his family left the village quite soon after this. Similarly, his name and presence largely vanish from the rest of the collection which is mainly populated by Wynne-Rhydderch’s own cast of characters. Quite a few of these have walk-on parts in a wonderful poem called “The Dead Forest” whose title refers to the telegraph poles carrying the ‘web of wires’ that links the houses in the village. In one hallway,
. photographs of
. two deceased husbands take it in turn to watch
. the Bakelite telephone in case it wakes.
In another part of town the landlady of The Sailor’s Arms
. lifts the receiver
. of the candlestick telephone to her lips as if it’s
. a glass of sherry
A local artist, Shannie Annie, is ‘willing the telephone to trill,’ hoping it will bring good news about her entry in a painting competition. Meanwhile the Sheridan family – whose sad story is told in another poem – miss the delivery of an important telegram because they are attending a funeral. Rather mysteriously, we learn that ‘Captain Rhymer can’t find the phone’ because
its cable is caught in the innards
of his wife’s sewing machine, mangled down
the cliff…
This is a consequence of the coastal erosion that is slowly but surely destroying houses at the edge of the village and bringing down the telegraph wire ‘so low / the wind has turned it into a skipping rope for / ghosts.’
Elsewhere, the poet herself responds to the ever-present sense of clinging to an exposed and crumbling boundary
When I am in my shed I’m not aware of the edge
of the cliff, only the edge of the poem.
When I am on edge I go to the shed
to try on the poem in my pen, in my mouth.
When I’m in my poem it has no edge,
it goes on even after the line ends
[“Writing Shed on the Edge”]
Some of the characters introduced “The Dead Forest” reappear in later poems. Captain Rhymer’s pet tortoise Jamsie is credited with teaching the poet a valuable life-lesson ’how to go at my own pace, / to retreat into my shell if need be’. The artist Shannie Annie becomes expert in painting local landmarks, taking only ‘sixteen, perhaps seventeen brushstrokes … to compose the body of the pier’. This same pier finds an unexpected use in “Miners’ Fortnight” when ‘men who’d breathe coal dust from dawn to dusk’ would take holidays in New Quay and, in spite of having paid for lodgings, would spend nights out on the pier ‘along the slabs like a human seam’ for the pleasure of sleeping in fresh air.
The miners’ simple enjoyment of being at the seaside is in contrast to the attitude of some more recent holidaymakers:
Let’s lie side by side on the sand, an inch apart,
nothing touching, let our small son bury us
one by one because we are as good as dead
inside. …
[“Tourists”]
It is tempting to keep on and on, trying to include as many as possible of the memorable incidents in this collection – for instance one that begins ‘Violet said to Evan the Death that she wanted to have something to remember her father by, so she asked to keep his leg’ or a scene in the village shop where a purchase can only be completed when all the other customers have been told
exactly
whom this cheese is for, or whether I’ll be eating it
alone in some sad attic or if I have a friend
who also likes ‘a bit of Bleu’.
[“Bleu d’Auvergne”]
Resisting that temptation, however, I will simply conclude by mentioning the final poem “Dead Reckoning” in which Wynne-Rhydderch reflects on her poetic journey through time and place in company with her real and imagined ancestors and friends. This turns into a reflection on mortality as she observes that she too is bound for ‘that invisible place to which this constellation / of characters have all charted their way’. Captain Rhymer and the rest aren’t entirely absent however. They sometimes ‘drop by at 3 a.m. with their little tics and coughs / their crumpled smiles and body parts’ simply to remind her that ‘the only thing that’s fixed about my death is the fact of it’. An appropriate response to such a memento mori, however, is to stand on the certainty that ‘Relatively speaking, I am here’; and from that vantage point Wynne-Rhydderch has conjured an affectionate and richly textured portrait of a place and its people that may resemble – rather more than we’d expect – the lives and locations through which we too are busy muddling our way.
Oct 12 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
Poetry review – MILK WOOD MEMOIR: Michael Bartholomew-Biggs is charmed by Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch’s poetic exploration of the lives and times of real and imagined inhabitants of a Welsh coastal town
Milk Wood Memoir
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
Picador Poetry
ISBN 978-103509 1072
£12.99
Sometimes all the ingredients of a book seem to fall magically into place. A poet lights upon a theme for a collection which proves to contain a rich seam of stories – both factual and fanciful – and which so captures their attention and affections that it draws deeply on their capacity for imaginative language, colourful metaphor, and simple playfulness. After that it only remains for the book to be discovered by a reader who can appreciate the authenticity yet still enjoy the author’s own inventive ways of shaping and enhancing it.
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch’s new collection Milk Wood Memoir is set in the Welsh seaside village of New Quay and explores its connection with Dylan Thomas and his famous radio “play for voices”, Under Milk Wood. It’s not clear how much of an overlap there is between New Quay and the fictional village of Llareggub. It is certain however that Dylan Thomas lived in New Quay during the early 1940s and so it is likely that he imported at least some of its features and people into his plotting.
Wynne-Rhydderch approaches the present-day village and its current inhabitants in much the same way that Dylan Thomas handled his location and cast of characters. She writes with humour and tenderness and a strong sense of how lives are shaped by the history and geography of a place – particularly the proximity of and dependence on the sea. New Quay and its surrounding woodlands are in fact slowly collapsing into the sea. If these solid physical features can disappear then how can we be sure of the boundaries between what’s real and what’s fanciful or between what is happening now and what is anchored in the past?
Dylan Thomas himself appears as a character in the early poems. “Aubade” portrays him on an early morning walk with ‘only his characters for company’; and it also gives us, the readers, a first glimpses of New Quay as a ‘jigsaw /of slate roofs and allotments … Think Sicily // with rain.’ Thomas only lived in New Quay for about nine months. In September 1944 he and his wife Caitlin, along with their two children, Llewelyn and Aeronwy, left London to escape the new danger from flying bomb attacks. The poem “Pram” records how, whenever it ‘squeaked past his house’, Aeronwy’s Silver Cross baby carriage ‘doubled as a drinks trolley’ to fortify Thomas and Wynne-Rhydderch’s grandfather on the walks they sometimes took together. A more dramatic incident lies behind “The Shooting of Dylan Thomas 6th March 1945”. The story begins in the local pub where a resident, Captain Killick, home on leave from active service, is disturbed when ‘in from the Blackout blew a curly-headed bloke / with two film people in tow’. This may lead us to suppose that any ‘shooting’ is going to turn out to be merely cinematography; but Killick has sized up Thomas as a ‘misfit dodging the war’ and become so enraged that he later fetches his Sten gun and takes a pot shot through Thomas’s window. Luckily no harm is done because everyone inside was
sitting on the floor when
bullets zipped through the kitchen wall
and lodged in the bathroom door.
Unsurprisingly, Thomas and his family left the village quite soon after this. Similarly, his name and presence largely vanish from the rest of the collection which is mainly populated by Wynne-Rhydderch’s own cast of characters. Quite a few of these have walk-on parts in a wonderful poem called “The Dead Forest” whose title refers to the telegraph poles carrying the ‘web of wires’ that links the houses in the village. In one hallway,
. photographs of
. two deceased husbands take it in turn to watch
. the Bakelite telephone in case it wakes.
In another part of town the landlady of The Sailor’s Arms
. lifts the receiver
. of the candlestick telephone to her lips as if it’s
. a glass of sherry
A local artist, Shannie Annie, is ‘willing the telephone to trill,’ hoping it will bring good news about her entry in a painting competition. Meanwhile the Sheridan family – whose sad story is told in another poem – miss the delivery of an important telegram because they are attending a funeral. Rather mysteriously, we learn that ‘Captain Rhymer can’t find the phone’ because
its cable is caught in the innards
of his wife’s sewing machine, mangled down
the cliff…
This is a consequence of the coastal erosion that is slowly but surely destroying houses at the edge of the village and bringing down the telegraph wire ‘so low / the wind has turned it into a skipping rope for / ghosts.’
Elsewhere, the poet herself responds to the ever-present sense of clinging to an exposed and crumbling boundary
When I am in my shed I’m not aware of the edge
of the cliff, only the edge of the poem.
When I am on edge I go to the shed
to try on the poem in my pen, in my mouth.
When I’m in my poem it has no edge,
it goes on even after the line ends
[“Writing Shed on the Edge”]
Some of the characters introduced “The Dead Forest” reappear in later poems. Captain Rhymer’s pet tortoise Jamsie is credited with teaching the poet a valuable life-lesson ’how to go at my own pace, / to retreat into my shell if need be’. The artist Shannie Annie becomes expert in painting local landmarks, taking only ‘sixteen, perhaps seventeen brushstrokes … to compose the body of the pier’. This same pier finds an unexpected use in “Miners’ Fortnight” when ‘men who’d breathe coal dust from dawn to dusk’ would take holidays in New Quay and, in spite of having paid for lodgings, would spend nights out on the pier ‘along the slabs like a human seam’ for the pleasure of sleeping in fresh air.
The miners’ simple enjoyment of being at the seaside is in contrast to the attitude of some more recent holidaymakers:
Let’s lie side by side on the sand, an inch apart,
nothing touching, let our small son bury us
one by one because we are as good as dead
inside. …
[“Tourists”]
It is tempting to keep on and on, trying to include as many as possible of the memorable incidents in this collection – for instance one that begins ‘Violet said to Evan the Death that she wanted to have something to remember her father by, so she asked to keep his leg’ or a scene in the village shop where a purchase can only be completed when all the other customers have been told
exactly
whom this cheese is for, or whether I’ll be eating it
alone in some sad attic or if I have a friend
who also likes ‘a bit of Bleu’.
[“Bleu d’Auvergne”]
Resisting that temptation, however, I will simply conclude by mentioning the final poem “Dead Reckoning” in which Wynne-Rhydderch reflects on her poetic journey through time and place in company with her real and imagined ancestors and friends. This turns into a reflection on mortality as she observes that she too is bound for ‘that invisible place to which this constellation / of characters have all charted their way’. Captain Rhymer and the rest aren’t entirely absent however. They sometimes ‘drop by at 3 a.m. with their little tics and coughs / their crumpled smiles and body parts’ simply to remind her that ‘the only thing that’s fixed about my death is the fact of it’. An appropriate response to such a memento mori, however, is to stand on the certainty that ‘Relatively speaking, I am here’; and from that vantage point Wynne-Rhydderch has conjured an affectionate and richly textured portrait of a place and its people that may resemble – rather more than we’d expect – the lives and locations through which we too are busy muddling our way.