R.S. Thomas – författare

Published to mark the poet's 80th birthday, this collection confirms R. S. Thomas as our pre-eminent poet.'This is the book I've been waiting for' Ted Hughes

R. S. Thomas was a major figure in the landscape of contemporary poetry - attested by his Nobel Prize for Literature nomination. His poetry, coloured by personal experience of rural Wales, is stark but passionate.

R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) is one of the major poets of our time, as well as one of the finest religious poets in the English language and Wales''s greatest poet. This substantial gathering of his late poems shows us the final flowering of a truly great poet still writing at the height of his powers right through his 70s and 80s. It begins with his autobiographical sequence "The Echoes Return Slow", which has been unavailable for many years, and goes up to "Residues", written immediately before his death at the age of 87. These powerful poems -- about time and history, the self, love, the machine, the Cross and prayer -- cover all of his major areas of questioning. This is R.S. Thomas in a winter light, his fury concentrated on the inhumanity of man and modern technology, his gaze absorbed by the God he felt in Nature, but finding nourishment in ''waste places''. At the same time he writes with resigned feeling and immense insight, as well as grim humour and playful irony, of isolation, ageing, marriage and ''love''s shining greenhouses''. For Thomas, ''Poetry is that / which arrives at the intellect / by way of the heart.''

R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) is a major writer of our time, one of the finest religious poets in the English language and one of Wales''s greatest poets. His output was prolific: over six decades he published some 25 individual collections of poems, as well as several volumes of prose. A substantial number of his poems, however, have hitherto remained uncollected, and often elusive -poems published in newspapers, magazines and journals (many of them obscure), as well as in private or limited editions. Uncollected Poems -published to mark the centenary of Thomas''s birth -brings together for the first time a rigorous selection of the best of these. The fruit of several years'' research by Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies, the volume makes available work which spans the whole of Thomas''s career -from an early sonnet to his first wife, M.E. Eldridge (included in his first, unpublished, collection Spindrift in the late 1930s) and previously uncollected Iago Prytherch poems, to other poems which are powerful expressions of the metaphysical meditations of his later years. Uncollected Poems is a companion volume to R.S. Thomas''s Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), the sequel to Collected Poems 1945-1990 (Dent, 1993; Phoenix Press, 2000), which only covers his collections up to Experimenting with an Amen (1986). Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 reprints in full the contents of R.S. Thomas''s last five collections, The Echoes Return Slow (Macmillan, 1988: unavailable for many years), and Bloodaxe''s Counterpoint (1990), Mass for Hard Times (1992), No Truce with the Furies (1995) and the posthumously published Residues (2002). There is no overlap between the two Bloodaxe editions: none of the poems in Residues, uncollected at the time of his death in 2000, is included in Uncollected Poems.