R.S. THOMAS AT EIGHTY
To begin on a personal note: R.S. Thomas is one of a handful of poets I seem to have been reading throughout my adult life. It was as a University student in the late 1960s that I picked up a copy of Tares in Galloway and Hodgson in upper Bangor, scanned it and brought it away with me. It's a slim volume with an unassuming two-colour cover in beige and cream: but in those days glossy packaging was unknown. The poem that really got to me was 'Here':
I am a man now.
Pass your hand over my brow:
You can feel the place where the brains grow.
Here was the real thing - language with a tough directness of utterance and a thrilling beauty, and a voice at once personal and universal. I was a convert. Subsequently I went back to the riches of Song at the Year's Turning, then forward with each successive volume as it emerged fresh from the press. To read the poets of the past is one thing: their oeuvres are complete -simply there, laid out before you, to be taken in any way you wish. Reading your contemporaries is different: it involves continuous adjustments as each new book adds its freight to what has gone before; is an evolutionary process in which surprise, pleasure, irritation, disappointment and many other feelings play their part.
Looking back at 'Here' from the vantagepoint of 1993, it seems powerfully to anticipate the later poetry of religious search. It ends:
It is too late to start
For destinations not of the heart.
I must stay here with my hurt.
Certainly the later poetry must cause us to revise the element of personal prophecy in this. It was not "too late" to set off for those "destinations"; often they have seemed destinations of intellect rather than "heart"; and the poet has resolutely carried his "hurt" with him - though one must add that it has never seemed his hurt alone.
R.S. Thomas seems always to have kept at least one step ahead of his readers. Along with unpredictability, he has always possessed the ability to provoke: it has never been possible to take him for granted. The realm of his lyrics is one of spiritual uncertainty: into this domain of definition and redefinition, a flux of becoming spotted with rare moments of stasis and tranquillity, readers are drawn until they are immired. Critics commonly divide his poetry into two periods, the first dominated by rural Wales, the second by a deus absconditus. But there are strong continuities. Both periods are concerned with interrogation, one of Iago Prytherch and his kind, the other of the vanished God. The shifting ambivalences at the centre of which stood, or stooped, the ragged peasant figure can be seen in retrospect as precursive of a whole cosmos of multiplying ambiguities, somewhere in whose midst flickered the tenuous, lone consciousness of the poet himself: neb, no one - less a stable point capable of organizing everything around it into a satisfying pattern, than a subatomic particle flashing erratically backwards and forwards in quantum space-time. His world is restless and provisional, he himself is a manifestation of its condition, and the few moments of poetic optimism he has achieved there since H'm a spiritual oasis in a Sahara of abstraction. As to the Eliot of Four Quartets (a poetic point of reference that has always meant a lot to him), it is the travelling, not the arriving, that matters, and to have been invited to travel with him for a quarter of a century has been an intellectual adventure that I for one am glad not to have missed.
***
Unsurprisingly, 1993 promises to be a red-letter year for R.S.T. publications. Pride of place is inevitably claimed by Collected Poems 1945-1990 (Dent £25), which its publisher has revise the element of personal prophecy in trailed as "the most important, so far non-existent work of this century". But if the term "Collected" is to be taken in anything approximating to its normal meaning, then this notional opus cannot even now be deemed to have emerged from the womb of time. Despite its substantiality, despite implicit claim that here is a major poet, Collected Poems 1945-1990 is a considerable disappointment and an opportunity missed. It contains around 500 poems, but on my count more than 160 others which appeared in the many books between The Stones of the Field (1946) and Experimenting with an Amen (1986) have been excluded. If these are added r to the century of poems which Sandra Anstey has logged (see below) as never having been printed in book form, it can be seen that Collected Poems represents a mere two-thirds of his output up to 1986. And still one has to add that Counterpoint and The Echoes Return Slow remain unrepresented in Dent's new book, and the recent Mass For Hard Times by a single poem. The skeleton, nervous system and internal organs of RS’s oeuvre are there in Collected Poems, but where oh where is the flesh? Occasions for grievance will be many, but high on my list of poems that I miss are 'An Old Man' and 'Ire' from The Stones of the Field, 'Memories' and 'The Mixen' from An Acre of Land, 'January' from Song at the Year's Turning, 'The Reception' and 'Self-portrait' from Laboratories of the Spirit and 'Threshold' from Frequencies. Moreover, lacking a Preface and/or Editor's Note, Collected Poems offers no explanation of the principles (or constraints?) that governed its compilation.
I doubt, then, that this is a book which will strongly tempt owners of substantial collections of RS. It is more likely to appeal to readers who have only a limited amount of his work on their shelves. Those with the requisite funds may prefer to invest in a copy of Frieze, an uncheap but handsome book of new poems. Published by Kevin Perryman's Babel press in an imprint of 500 copies, it is available from Gartenstr. 29, Postfach 31,8913 Schondorf/ Ammersee, Germany and comes in three qualities: a signed, full leather version (numbers 1 to 20: £90), a signed hardbound version, (numbers 21 to 100: £45); and a softbound version (£15). Babel magazine has long been a continental advocate of RS’s work, printing German translations of his poems alongside the originals. Babel 1 was largely devoted to him, Babel 4 (1984-85) and Babel VI (1990) contained further selections (four and fourteen poems respectively), and the forthcoming Babel VII will have ten more, drawn from the 21 years between H'm and Frieze. The magazine has a further claim on the attention of readers in Wales on account of its hospitality to the poems and translations of Sheenagh Pugh.
Frieze is billed as "30 new poems", but in fact contains 29, since 'Newts' also appeared in Mass for Hard Times. (Here too is 'Visions', from PW's 'Poets After 70' Special last year.) It is a strong and characteristic collection, touching on the familiar themes of recent years. Its manner might be described as “late R.S.” as Last Poems is late Yeats, and in fact the poetry of Yeats is invoked on a number of occasions. This isn't just a matter of allusion - Yeats's dancer lost in the dance is referred to twice - it is one of subject matter. 'Girl', for instance, might be seen as RS’s 'Politics'. Yeats, seeing a girl in the street, longed for his youth again, so that he could hold her in his arms; by contrast, R.S.'s brand of modernity seems anti-Romantic:
...so dark
a smile for so palea face. The breasts in bud,
but ample enoughfor you to bury your head
in and return to the mother,learning, sobbing, that to grow
old is not to grow wise.
Unlike Yeats, R.S. distances himself from his own longing, passing it over to a second person incompletely divorced from his first. Yeats was perfectly happy to seem for his art's sake a fool; R.S. more coolly contemplates the condition from a distance. His is an old head on old shoulders.
Frieze is tough, humorous and relaxed by turns. 'Polar' reports on the harshness of nature at the icecap, returning with the perception
that there is nothing between thought
and its object, that speech failed
from the beginning, that meaning
is the last thing that life
trips over, as it is caught up
in the dance with the dancer.
This is post-structuralist, the poet at one moment disconnecting signifier and signified, the next, in a single ambiguous phrase, at once denying the possibility of 'meaning' (“life will never trip over it”) and rescuing it (“life will certainly encounter it at the last”).
Yeats's dancer never seemed likely to be heading for a fall, nor does Shiva, who dances us into the poem. But such a possibility is always on the cards in R.S. Thomas.
'Play' might be read as a piece of reader-teasing:
The eyes know
that I know they know
I surprised them,
yet return, neither
shyly nor boldly,
to surprise mine
preparing to surprise them
over again. So butterflies,
about to collide, glance
off, widening their distance,
the next instant
to reappear, chasing
one another in a tireless
effort to determine who
is in pursuit of whom.
The tease rests on a cushion of poetic equanimity, and this quality of relaxedness manifests itself often enough in this collection to suggest that, though he remains capable of provocation and is still in love with paradox, R.S. Thomas may have dissolved some of the more extreme tensions that have animated his writing in the past... though even as I say this, I recognize that to say as much is to risk rebuke by the next book...
'Never despair' is a splendid poem that re-inforces this impression:
Do you despair with all
these conurbations above you?They are the legions the God-
Man was unwilling to summon.After the last symphony, the last
painting, electricity will continue.There are new forms and new media
the brilliance of his mind blinds us to.When from the human tree the last
leaf will have fallen on the last grave.the tree of heaven will be alive still
with thoughts resting momentarily
on migration.
I do not recall anything quite like this from this poet before. The sympathetic detachment that exists here is R.S.'s equivalent to the tonal ambience of much late Yeats. It is unusual to find a Christian sensibility contemplating the annihilation of homo sapiens, the end of the human experiment with such playful equanimity, but Christian the poem certainly seems to be. The 'God-Man' who appears here (and 'Man' is notable for its equalizing capital) is by no means a being devoid of love. But love is not infatuation, and creative minds move on.
***
This eightieth birthday has brought a small rush of critical anthologies on R.S.'s work. Two - Critical Writings on R.S. Thomas edited by Sandra Anstey, and The Page's Drift: R.S. Thomas at 80, edited by M. Wynn Thomas - are from Seren Books in Wales; a third, Miraculous Simplicity, edited by William V. Davis, is from the University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, U S.A. (I'm grateful to Seren and U.A.P .for sending me sheets of the latter two in order that I might notice them here.) Critical Writings appeared in 1992, and is the second, revised edition of this book. Only The Page's Drift consists entirely of newly written essays; Miraculous Simplicity contains just one original piece (by M. Wynn Thomas again - only one of a number of writers whose names appear more than once on the contents pages of these books). Long-time readers of Welsh magazines are likely to find many pieces in Miraculous Simplicity and Critical Writings that are familiar to them and the further fact that several essays appear in both books may incline them to purchase only one. The duplicated contributions are: Brian Morris - 'The Topography of R.S. Thomas'; R. George Thomas -'Humanus Sum: A Second Look at R.S. Thomas'; and Tony Brown –‘”On the Screen of Eternity”: Some Aspects of R.S. Thomas's Prose'. Furthermore, the essay by James A. Davies which appears in Miraculous Simplicity is an extended version of his essay in Critical Writings. Critical Writings has Cecil Price on the early poems, H.J. Savill on the Iago Prytherch poems, Randal Jenkins on the Occasional Prose, Roland Mathias, A.M. Allchin and K.E. Smith on the religious poetry, Peter Abbs on R.S. and Ted Hughes, John Barnie on Neb and Tony Bianchi on R.S. and his readers. Miraculous Simplicity has M. Wynn Thomas on R.S. and Wales, J.D. Vicary, William V. Davis, Donald Davie, Vimala Herman and Julian Gitzen on the religious poetry, Belinda Hum£rey on the Emblem Poetry and Patrick Deane on R.S.'s language. Naturally, the quality of both volumes varies, but both contain strong work. For readers who wish only to purchase one of these, a clinching factor (apart from price, which I cannot report upon) may be the fact that Miraculous Simplicity contains, reprinted from 'Contemporary Authors', R.S. Thomas's 'Autobiographical Essay' and, reprinted from Planet 80 (1990), Ned Thomas and John Barnie's revealing interview with the poet.
The Page's Drift is also uneven. Deeply meditated work sits alongside work that is less inspired and in patches perfunctory, with a couple of products smacking a little of the commissioner's need. Following a useful bibliographical piece by Sandra Anstey (to which I am indebted above) come articles by Anne Stevenson ('The Uses of Prytherch'), Helen Vendler (R.S. and Painting), Rowan Williams ('Dangerous Thoughts'), William V. Davis again ('Gaps' in R.S.'s poetry), Marie Therese Castay ('The Self and the Other'), Tony Brown again ('The Sea and Self- Definition'), Walford Davies (R.S. and Dylan Thomas) and Ned Thomas (R.S. and Wales). I found the pieces by Helen Vendler, Rowan Williams, Marie Therese Castay and Walford Davies most stimulating, and Rowan Williams's contribution the most profound (as well as difficult) of all. I had been wondering for some time when a critic would attempt to read R.S.'s notions of absence and presence in the light of Derrida's concept of differance (deference), and am piqued that the Bishop of Monmouth should be the one to broach (though not to develop at length) this possibility. Perhaps some intrepid critic will now attempt a full length exposition from this perspective...
***
This is an eightieth birthday special, and although Poetry Wales's many happy returns must be offered retrospectively to R.S. Thomas, we can still wish him a poetically productive future. Penblwydd hapus i chwi. R.S., a gobeithiwn gwnewch .fwynhau llawer o flynyddoedd cynhyrchiol.
Our special feature has been conceived in a spirit of tribute and celebration, but we trust that it in execution is not saccharine, adulatory or perfunctory. So honest and uncompromising an individual would be ill-served by a response that did not try to match the qualities for which he is renowned. And in fact it is the problematic nature of the man and his opinions that exercises a number of the contributors to this issue. But that is enough from me by way of introduction. The writers who appear below are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves.
Issue 29.2 of Poetry Wales will feature poetry in persona, with contributions from Glenda Beagan, Tony Curtis, Alison Touster-Reed, Pascale Petit, Stephen Knight, Neal Mason, Roland Mathias, Steve Short, Dannie Abse Catherine Fisher, Sheenagh Pugh, Peter Abbs, Ruth Bidgood, Duncan Tweedale and others. Reviews include Peter Finch on Lou Reed's poems and Anne Stevenson on Anna Akhmatova’s Complete Poems.
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