The theology and the poetry of Welch poet R.S. Thomas.

R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) is one of the major poets of the twentieth-century, the greatest Welsh poet since Dylan Thomas, and one of the finest religious poets in the English language. 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 in his 70s and 80s. It begins with his autobiographical sequence, The Echoes Return Slow, unavailable for many years, and also includes, Counterpoint, Mass for Hard Times, No Truce With the Furies, and his final collection, Residues.

The award-winning life story of Wales national poet and vicar R.S. Thomas is “a biography touched by genius.” (Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday) R.S. Thomas is widely considered as one of the twentieth-century’s greatest English language poets. His bitter yet beautiful collections on Wales, its landscape, people and identity, reflect a life of political and spiritual asceticism. Indeed, Thomas is a man who banned vacuum cleaners from his house on grounds of noise, whose first act on moving into an ancient cottage was to rip out the central heating, and whose attempts to seek out more authentically Welsh parishes only brought him more into contact with loud English holidaymakers. To Thomas’s many admirers this will be a surprising, sometimes shocking, but at last humanising portrait of someone who wrote truly metaphysical poetry. “A masterpiece.” —Daily Express “A striking, vivid and tender reading of the man . . . Excellent.” —Observer “Riotiously funny.” —Rowan Williams, Sunday Times “It is precisely Byron Rogers’ darkly comic sense of the ridiculous that melts the frost from the head of R.S. Thomas and humanizes a remote and bleakly beautiful writer.” —The Times “A chatty, disorderly but extremely good [biography] . . . A wonderfully comprehensive picture of the man.” —Daily Telegraph “As revealing an account of a severely private person that anyone could hope to achieve.” —Alan Brownjohn, Times Literary Supplement “Engagingly high-spirited and daring.” —Andrew Motion, Guardian Book of the Week “Charming and deftly written. . . . A very funny book.” —Literary Review “As readable and rounded a life of the man as could be written.” —Tablet Winner of the James Tait Black prize for biography

This book is one philosopher's response to the poetry of R. S. Thomas. It examines the poet's struggle with the possibilities of sense in religion: R. S. Thomas has described his poetry as an obsession with the possibility of having 'conversations or linguistic confrontations with ultimate reality'. Some attempts at giving meaning to religious belief cannot withstand the assaults of criticism. In R. S. Thomas's verse, however, there emerges a hard-won celebration of the worship of a hidden God; a rare achievement in contemporary poetry. In plotting the course of the development of the poetry, the book brings out its many similarities with the thrusts and counter-thrusts of argument in the philosophy of religion in the second half of the twentieth century. The book should be of interest not only to admirers of R. S. Thomas, but to philosophers, theologians, students of literature, and to anyone concerned with questions concerning the sense or senselessness of religious belief.

RS Thomas was the greatest religious poet writing in English in the 20th century, but the 270 poems he chose for this definitive selection reveal a wide range of themes and concerns. He was a passionate Welsh patriot, but also an outspoken critic of his countrymen. His poems are an expression of his lifelong argument with himself, of his insistent search for God. In them he grapples with ideas of Welshness, with issues of technology, pollution, the decline of culture. He wrote too about love, about landscape, nature and birds. His is an urgent, prophetic and unique voice.

R. S. Thomas writes his often dour lines out of the hard landscape of the Welsh hills. His poems are so much a part of that land that farmers and their families, people he calls by name, walk inside them.

Christopher Morgan writes with keen critical insight on the controversial poet R.S. Thomas, considered to be one of the leading writers of the 20th century. This is the first book to treat Thomas's entire oeuvre and will prove to be an indispensible guide and companion to the complete poems.

This collection of poems by Wales' most famous poet-priest, R S Thomas, is interspersed with short reflections and questions for exploration that connect the timeless poetry to the landscape that inspired it. Originally produced locally for visitors to the North Wales village and church where R S Thomas was the parish priest, its appeal extends to all who know and love the raw honesty and sparse, striking style of the poetry, and whose own faith and questions are mirrored in it. Aberdaron still welcomes streams of visitors, R S Thomas aficionados and pilgrims en route to the nearby holy island of Bardsey. This book brings the poetry alive in a fresh way and provides a pilgrim guide to the locality, along with reflections that enable armchair readers everywhere to enter more deeply into the world of the poems. All royalties will continue to go to maintaining the church at Aberdaron.

With the season of Advent, the coming of Christ is imminent, and following the contours of the season leads through a rich time of preparation for God-with-us in the Incarnation. R. S. Thomas, a poet of waiting and anticipation, can be a profound guide for this season. His spiritual and poetic trajectory of discovering the presence of God - divine ‘frequencies’ - even in apparent absence, can help lead us into an Advent landscape of surrender, open-hearted discovery, epiphany and encounter. This collection of 28 reflections on Thomas’s poetry travels through the season, and follows one of the traditional patterns of themes explored in each Sunday of Advent: a Carmelite pattern of waiting, accepting, journeying and birthing.

At his death in 2000, R. S. Thomas was widely considered to be one of the major poets of the English-speaking world, having been nominated for the Nobel prize for Literature. With Dylan Thomas, R. S. Thomas is probably Wales’s best-known poet internationally.Tony Brown provides an introduction to R. S. Thomas’s life and work, as well as new perspectives and insights for those already familiar with the poetry. His approach is broadly chronological, interweaving life and work in order to evaluate Thomas’s poetic achievement. In addition to presenting a full discussion of Thomas’s poetry, and its movements over time between personal, spiritual and political concerns, Tony Brown also examines Thomas’s contribution to the culture of Wales, not just in his writing but also his political interventions and activism on behalf of Welsh language and culture.