Uncollected Poems
By R. S. Thomas
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Thank God that that which was un- became collected, published, shared (and gifted!). Few writers have so touched, so conveyed the disappearing God.
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Uncollected Poems - R. S. Thomas
R.S. THOMAS
UNCOLLECTED POEMS
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spans the whole of Thomas’s career – from an early sonnet to his first wife, M.E. Eldridge (included in his first, unpublished, collection Spindrift in the late 1930s) and previously uncollected Iago Prytherch poems, to other poems which are powerful expressions of the metaphysical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.
R.S. Thomas’s Uncollected Poems takes its place alongside Collected Poems 1945–1990 (Dent, 1993; Phoenix, 2000), Selected Poems (Penguin, 2003) and Collected Later Poems 1988–2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2004). It gives readers of R.S. Thomas’s work access to much new and fascinating material.
COVER PHOTOGRAPHS
R.S. Thomas: left, 1979; right, 1956 (Gwent Jones); above, family outing, 1960s
NOTES ON THE EDITORS
Professor Tony Brown teaches in the School of English at Bangor University. He is the editor of The Collected Stories of Glyn Jones (University of Wales Press, 1999) and was the founder-editor of the journal Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays (1995–2007). His numerous publications in the field of Welsh writing in English include many essays on the work of R.S. Thomas, and his R.S. Thomas in the Writers of Wales series (University of Wales Press, 2006; new ed. 2013) was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize, 2007.
Dr Jason Walford Davies is Senior Lecturer in the School of Welsh at Bangor University. He is the editor and translator of Thomas’s Welsh-language autobiographical writings, R.S. Thomas: Autobiographies (Dent, 1997) and the author of a monograph on the poet's indebtedness to the Welsh-language literary tradition, Gororau’r Iaith [The Marches of Language] (University of Wales Press, 2003), which was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Prize, 2004. His edition of Thomas’s correspondence with poet and critic Raymond Garlick (Gomer Press) appeared in 2009.
Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies are the Co-Directors of the R.S. Thomas Study Centre, the major archive of R.S. Thomas material, published and unpublished, at Bangor University.
R.S. Thomas
UNCOLLECTED POEMS
EDITED BY
TONY BROWN &
JASON WALFORD DAVIES
I
Nancy, Sara ac Alys
a
Meinir, Mari a Rhys
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As will be evident, tracking down poems from often obscure and sometimes short-lived journals, then the checking and re-checking of texts and publication details, has been a long process. In this time-consuming hunt for poetic needles in literary haystacks we have received invaluable assistance from numerous fellow readers of R.S. Thomas. In particular we are indebted to the indispensable bibliography of R.S. Thomas’s published poems up to 1979 which was compiled by Sandra Anstey as part of her doctoral dissertation at Swansea University; we are also grateful to her for sending us some subsequent uncollected poems. In addition we very gratefully acknowledge the help, in various forms, which we received from John Freeman, Huw Ceiriog Jones, Morag Law, Kevin Perryman, Anne Price-Owen, Andrew Rudd, Meic Stephens, Graham Thomas, M. Wynn Thomas, Jeff Towns, Damian Walford Davies, Daniel Westover and Michael Whitworth.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Bat
‘I never thought’
July 5 1940
Confessions of an Anglo-Welshman
Gideon Pugh
Llanddewi Brefi
Song
Lines for Taliesin
Three Countries
Welsh Shepherd
Y Gwladwr
The Peasant [tr. Jason Walford Davies]
The Two Sisters
Auguries
Darlington
No Answer
Peasant Girl Weeping
Original Sin
Proportions
Somersby Brook
A Welsh Ballad Singer
Commission
Farm Wives
Growing Up
Midnight on the Farm
Not So
Question
Indoors
The Meeting
Hiker
Brochure
Exile
Frontiers
Work To Do
Yesterday’s Farm
Half-past Five
Two Versions of a Theme
An Old Flame
Images
The Reader
The Return
The Need
Song
Thoughts by the Sea
Aye, aye –
The Grave
Old Man
Shame
Some Place
Symbols
The Wisdom of Eliaser
Ynys Enlli
The Bank Clerk
Farm-hand
Nobodies
Somebody
Vocation
Chat
Dimensions
Now
Autobiography
Inferno
Sonata in X
Hamlet
Richard Hughes
Where?
The Climber
Dedication
Pension
The Source
Staying
Coming of Age
Progressions
Appointments
Cancellation
Codex
Coming True
Converse
General X
Quest
Sister Non
Stop Press
Excursion
Grass Platforms
The New Noah
Predicaments
The Tree
The Big Preachers
Cybi and Seiriol
Feminine Gender
Poets’ Meeting
Repertory
The Undying
The Cry
Caught
The View from Europe
A Wish
A1
Epilogue
Gwallter Mechain
Insularities
Cymru (Wales)
Wings
Process
Sick Child
Born Lost
The Lesson
Plas yn Rhiw
A Species
Abaty Cwm Hir
Calling
Elders
Filming
The Gallery
In Memory of James and Frances Williams
Oil
Story
Tourney
The Hummingbird Never Came
Pharpar
Blackbird
Diary
Dreams
Everywhere
Island Boatman
Talk
‘Waiting for the tale to begin’
Birthday
The Father Dies
Luminary
The Hill
In Memory of Ted Hughes
‘The computer is unable’
‘Easter. I approach’
‘One drop of blood’
‘A bird’s prayer’
‘Language has run its course’
The Orphan
Pact
Bibliography
About the Author
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
No sooner had we started on the long process that has culminated in the present volume than, as ever, we discovered that R.S. Thomas was ahead of us with a cautionary note: ‘Poems we threw up / too far back are not / to return to’ (‘Predicaments’, 1981). However, when we began to study Thomas’s uncollected poems – that is, those published in magazines, newspapers, journals, pamphlets etc., but not included in any of his collections – it immediately became apparent that there were in fact a significant number of poems from ‘far back’ that were indeed well worth ‘returning to’. In fact, there existed a substantial body of work, from all stages of the poet’s sixty-year career, that deserved to be reclaimed and brought to readers’ attention. Uncollected Poems is a selection of what we consider to be the best of these ‘lost’ poems (a full list of the poems we have been able to identify is included in a bibliography at the end of the volume). While our main criterion in making a selection has been the quality of the poetry, we have also included poems which have particular autobiographical significance or which reveal aspects of Thomas’s thematic and stylistic development. The poems are thus arranged in chronological order (and in alphabetical order within individual years). One of the effects of this arrangement, for instance, is to highlight the strikingly rapid evolution of Thomas’s poetic style and the achievement of his distinctive voice in the years immediately following Spindrift, his first, unpublished, collection from the late 1930s. This arrangement, moreover, serves to emphasise the remarkable fertility