Collected Poems: 1945-1990 R.S.Thomas: Collected Poems : R S Thomas (Everymans Poetry)

A collection of R. 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. Paperback , pages. Published October 5th by Phoenix first published To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

To ask other readers questions about Collected Poems , please sign up. Lists with This Book. Dec 30, Domhnall rated it it was amazing Shelves: Is there a good way to write poetry? In the late Sixties, like many thousands of other unwashed urchins, I encountered RS Thomas at school in a slap-in-the-face poem that has puzzled me ever since. He died you know With his face to the wall, as the manner is Of the poor peasant in his stone croft On the Welsh hills The bare floor without a rug Or mat to soften the loud tread Of neighbours crossing the uneasy boards To peer at Davies with gruff words Of meaningless comfort; b Is there a good way to write poetry?

The bare floor without a rug Or mat to soften the loud tread Of neighbours crossing the uneasy boards To peer at Davies with gruff words Of meaningless comfort; before they turned Heartless away from the stale smell Of death in league with those dank walls. Death of a Peasant In his capacity as an Anglican priest for rural communities, RS Thomas displays a proprietorial attitude to his own people, the real folk of the Welsh hills, but I am not convinced that he makes the mistake of assuming he is one of them.

From my reading about Lloyd George for example, I imagine the Welsh as Non-Conformists when they are even Christians, to whom the Anglican Church was an imposition, representative of the landowner rather than the peasant.

R.S. Thomas

He does not even especially admire them. You failed me farmer, I was afraid you would The day I saw you loitering with the cows, Yourself one of them The two things That could redeem your ignorance, the beauty And grace that trees and flowers labour to teach, Were never yours, you shut your heart against them.

You stopped your ears to the soft influence Of birds, preferring For this I leave you Alone in your harsh acres, herding pennies Into a sock to serve you for a pillow Through the long night that waits upon your span. The idiot goes round and around With his brother in a bumping car At the fair. This is mankind Being taken for a ride by a rich Relation Sure enough, Rose Cottage, the one pretty little sight in a terrace of simple red brick dwellings, is not Welsh after all, but home to the invader: It was registered in the heart Of a nation, and so, sure Of its being.

All summer It generated the warmth Of its blooms, red lamps To guide you. And if you came Too late in the bleak cold Of winter, there were the faces At the window, English faces, With red cheeks, countering the thorns.

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Rose Cottage Thomas dislikes the English, or more accurately, he hates the way their sentiment and money has made fools of the Welsh. English money is alienating to his mind, English values are all wrong: We were a people bred on legends, Warming our hands at the red past We were a people and we are so yet, When we have finished quarrelling for crumbs Under the table, or gnawing the bones Of a dead culture, There is no present in Wales And no future; There is only the past Brittle with relics, Wind bitten towers and castles With sham ghosts; Mouldering quarries and mines; And an impotent people, Sick with inbreeding, Worrying the carcass of an old song.

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Men of the hills, wantoners, men of Wales, With your sheep and your pigs and your ponies, your sweaty females, How I have hated you for your irreverence, your scorn even Of the refinements of art and the mysteries of the Church. You who are indifferent to all that I can offer, Caring not whether I blame or praise, With your pigs and your sheep and your sons And hollow cheeked daughters, You will continue to unwind your days In a crude tapestry under the jealous heavens To affront, bewilder, yet compel my gaze.

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One senses that his is not a satisfying mission. Being Irish, and subjected as much as anyone to the drivel of patriotic verse, I have to admire the Welsh for their national poetry, so harshly real and so concentrated on direct observation of the people within and as part of their natural world. His poem about WB Yeats is perhaps revealing. I have always distrusted Yeats, arguably Ireland's national poet, for his patriotism based on fantasy, the core of a more vicious nationalism in my personal opinion. Memories of Yeats While Travelling to Holyhead RS Thomas has a very unsentimental and hard-nosed type of nationalism but I find it far more appealing than the alternatives I have encountered because it is so well rooted in the soil and hard rock of its own place.

Maybe that is why I struggled with him in my school days. Something that is brutally factual can yield astonishing visions. I think this is a good way to mythologise a nation for its school-children and a good way, if there is one, to be a national poet. What was it Chaucer Said once about the long toil That goes like blood to the poem's making? Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls, Limp as bindweed, if it break at all Life's iron crust.

Man, you must sweat And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build Your verse a ladder. I come back to the collection, especially the devotional is that really the right word? I can't critique this, really: Jan 21, Daniel Seifert rated it it was amazing. What resonates and what I benefit from reading the poetry of R. His life-long examination of the human situation within his small parish and the unconscious, e.

God is that great absence In our lives, the empty silence Within. Give yourself To science that reveals All, asking no pay For it. Knowledge is power; The old oracle Has not changed. The nucleus In the atom awaits Our bidding. Come forth, We cry, and the dust spreads Its carpet. Over the creeds And masterpieces our wheels go. May 15, Peter rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: All who love the old country.

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Poetry that searches beneath the surface of Welsh rural life in much the same way that the Welsh mined their hills, and faithfully carries and recreates the self same character of those hills; deep, rich language at once beautiful, rugged, intimate and affectionate but also at times stark, hard and astringent without embellishme "This is Premier League Modern Poetry" to slightly misquote a good friend of mine; heavy weight poetry every bit as Welsh as Heaney is Irish or Tony Harrison is English. Poetry that searches beneath the surface of Welsh rural life in much the same way that the Welsh mined their hills, and faithfully carries and recreates the self same character of those hills; deep, rich language at once beautiful, rugged, intimate and affectionate but also at times stark, hard and astringent without embellishment or adornment.

He also manages to capture some of the journey of faith for the thinker and the intellectual; being totally unafraid of facing up to disappointment, hard life experience, solitude, mystery and paradox whilst asking hard questions to which there are no answers. To quote one literary critic, "In Christian terms, Thomas is not a poet of the transfiguration, of the resurrection, of human holiness He is a poet of the Cross, the unanswered prayer, the bleak trek through darkness, and his theology of Jesus, in particular, seems strange against any known traditional norm. Sublime, exquisite and challenging poetry!!!

Nov 25, Ryan Williams rated it liked it. Thomas was nicknamed The Ogre of Wales, often aptly. He was a tangle of contradictions: His habit of preaching to farmers about the evils of central heating in freezing rural chapels didn't go down particularly well either. He was, as my Mother said, a bit of a twp Welsh for dimwit. The earlier work tends to be the best, especially t R. The earlier work tends to be the best, especially the Iago Prytherch sequence which Seamus Heaney much admired.

They don't flatter national vanities, but they're taut, evocative poems - 'A Labourer', 'Welsh Landscape' and 'Welsh History. It's true there is a rather sunless feel to his poems, but that makes the flashes of brightness all the more moving when they do occur. His poems to his late wife and the sonnet 'The Bright Field' a rare example of telling outdoing showing firmly belong in this category.

Recommend the Phoenix edition rather than the Penguin classics version. Feb 04, Helen rated it really liked it. Perhaps coming across this book of collected poems by R. Thomas was not the best introduction on the one hand. Its 21 books spanning from can feel overwhelming, and at pages it's not something I can or would want to read quickly.

But what a voice! I didn't know there was this treasure trove to be discovered, and I'm elated to find there is. Thomas writes with such Perhaps coming across this book of collected poems by R. Thomas writes with such a sense of time and place, and it's gratifying to feel his journey through six decades in words. All imbued with this strange kind of conflict of claustrophobic intimacy and transience, which I suppose is what sometimes happens when a place for a person becomes more than a place in this sense, Wales. No obvious relation between these, but just for the sheer joy they bring, in little intervals.

Apr 28, Trilby rated it it was amazing Shelves: To add more books, click here. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. R S Thomas by R. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. Thomas , Anthony Thwaite editor 4.

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Selected Poems by R. Collected Later Poems by R. Everyman's Poetry by R. Thomas , Anthony Thwaite Editor 4. No Truce With the Furies by R. Uncollected Poems by R. Mass for Hard Times by R. Laboratories Of The Spirit by R. Song at the Year's Turning: Poems, by R. Thomas , John Betjeman Introduction 3. The Echoes Return Slow by R.