Product Description

A collection of R.S. Thomas's poems, published to mark his 80th birthday. Many of his themes are prophetic to issues such as technology and our use of it to destroy the natural world; and the search for personal and national identity and for meaning in human life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #121767 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

From the Publisher
A wonderful collection of the poetic works of the late R.S. Thomas with a new foreword by Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. “Read these poems” Stephen Spender. “This is a book I’ve been waiting for” Ted Hughes.

About the Author
R. S. Thomas was born in 1913. He has won numerous awards for his poetry, including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1964. His autobiography, Neb, is published by J. M. Dent in September 1995. He died in 2000.

Customer Reviews

Essential Collection.
This is a wonderful collection of poems by one of the foremost writers of the twentieth century, now, alas, no longer with us. His poems range from his early fascination with the Welsh landscape, through poems reflecting on his life as a parish priest in the Anglican church in Welsh country parishes, to a later, remarkable questioning of the whole meaning of faith, God and life. In his very latest poems he wrote movingly of his marriage and the death of his first wife. Throughout his poems the voice is strong and utterly distinctive - nowhere more so than when describing his "deus absconditus" - the god who is never quite within reach of our questioning. This is a book I would not be without.

Excellent Poet - Excellent value collection
Ronald Stuart Thomas is one of the few commercially successful poets of the late twentieth century. His early work has tended to be more popular than his later, more fragile work, but his honesty and directness shines through all of his poems. His later work reflects his doubts about God, something that was a big issue for him, him being a member of the Anglican Clergy. But his poems reach out to all, with their environmental and personal concerns, as well as his lamenting his departed wife. This volume lacks an introduction, but shear amount of poems within, and the amazing price, make this an excellent buy for all interested in English poems.

One of the twentieth century's greatest poets
R.S.Thomas was probably the greatest miniaturist of all twentieth century poets. He could write with greater profundity and insight in eight lines than most poets manage in eighty. Not all his poems are that short, of course. He was a Welsh priest who celebrated the lives of Welsh peasant farmers and other parishioners whom he had seen through birth, life, marriage, death. As time went on his range broadened, and more and more he wrestled with the elusive God at the corner of his vision; a half-glimpsed presence, or even an absence, that nevertheless he was drawn to, that gave shape to his vision of life.

He was both fascinated and appalled by modern science and technology; codifying it as, 'the machine' he often wrote of its dehumanising and destructive effect.

But there are also poems that are fascinating commentaries on paintings seen in European museums; poems about his marriage; poems about England's role in the economic and cultural problems Wales has faced.

Thomas was honest, unsentimental, profound and modern. Anyone who relishes the power of poetry to move and transform us should read his work.