R. S. Thomas: Uncollected Poems

I recently read an amusing biography of the poet R. S. Thomas by Byron Rogers called The Man Who Went into the West. Together with his Uncollected Poems they make an interesting addition to the literature by and about Thomas, surely one of the most gifted poets of the last century.

R. S. Thomas died in September 2000 and I have always admired his poetry, an uncanny blend of bleak brilliance and sardonic wit at times tempered by his empathy for the harsh reality of the human condition when put to the ultimate test. His Uncollected Poems, edited by Tony Brown and Jason Davies is just what it says - a collection of poems culled from small magazines and limited print runs of collections that did not reach his main collections of which there are of course many.

The poems here reflect all of Thomas' preoccupations from those with what he thought of as 'Welshness' or 'Englishness' and the sad state of the Welsh nation and language to those that meditate upon God, man and 'the Machine', Thomas' shorthand for the domination of scientific technology over the spiritual and human.

Early poems here have familiar themes - Welsh farm life and characters such as Iago Prytherch make their appearance as well as Welsh places and even a poem wholly in Welsh called  Y Gwladwr meaning 'The Peasant' in the translation provided. These early poems are supple and strong like the hill farmers Thomas ministered to in his parishes though if Byron Rogers is correct, they themselves did not always appreciate finding their way into Thomas' poems. Here is an extract from The Peasant:

"Everyone now asks what will become
Of a world that turns away from God's sunlight
To look at the endless night,"

For Thomas, roots in the land keep the peasant-farmer "safe from the invincible sea/Of that darkness", a darkness without God which he questioned so often in his verse - sometimes finding there the "eternally new", sometimes an absence that simply refused an answer.

Of the later poems, some are concerned with language, some with the environment and some with what might be called 'presences' that for Thomas seem to hover at the threshold of thought and imagination such as in Coming of Age, a meditation on the loss of conscience that Thomas perceives in the contemporary outlook:

"The repentances are over.
The prodigals have nowhere to return
to. They are their own
fathers and forgave themselves
at their setting forth."

This kind of disassociation with both authentic self-hood and tradition is a constant concern of Thomas for whom modernity has created a society that vows "to acknowledge no vow" with all the incipient vacuity that follows.

Always exciting, never without provocation, even these uncollected poems may have found their way into the collections of a poet with a less stringent standard of perfection. Language, says Thomas in one late poem "has run its course" just as the computer "is unable to find God". Without faith, asserts the ageing but unfailing bard,

                      "there is only
the machine's repetitions,
parallel tramlines of prose
never to come together as praise."

And the vocation of the poet, if it is anything, is to celebrate and praise, a vocation from which Thomas never once wavered.

Centre image: St Hywyn's Church, Aberdaron.