Following the success of Under Milk Wood, the first title to be issued in Aldine Paperbacks, the publishers thought that the present selection would bring Thomas’s gift as poet, short-story writer and broadcaster before the widest possible public.

          There is first of all a generous selection from his poetry, including memorable pieces such as "The Force that through the Green Fuse drives the Flower" and "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night", and a number not found in the usual anthologies.

          The prose includes the script "Return Journey" in which a very original form of radio drama is conceived, a form which the poet fully worked out in Under Milk Wood. Four admirable stories, "The Map of Love", "The Mouse and the Woman", "The Visitor" and "The Followers", are also well chosen as exhibiting Dylan Thomas’s kindly, humorous and sometimes compassionable view of life. All four pieces show variety of mood and treatment.

          Two broadcasts, "Reminiscences of Childhood", vividly recalling "a fine, live people, the spirit of Wales itself", and "Memories of Christmas", are also included. In the latter sample the poet evokes with all his word-magic the childhood Christmases in Wales – "when they tobogganed all the afternoon on the best tea-tray and Mrs Griffiths complained, and we threw a snowball at her niece, and my hands burned so, with the heat and the cold, when I held them in front of the fire, that I cried for twenty minutes and then had some jelly".