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Collected Later Poems 1988 – 2000 by R.S. Thomas.
Bloodaxe Books. 368pp; £9.95.

This volume is the sequel to Thomas’s Collected Poems 1945 - 1990, and so substantial an oeuvre is it that the two volumes almost seem to add up to a complete poems. But given, for example, the recent discovery of around thirty new poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, one does not know what is yet to turn up of R.S. Thomas’s. For the Thomas aficionado and, of course, for Welsh academia, this new volume is a welcome regathering of Thomas’s five last published collections plus the posthumously published Residues (2002). There is some confusion as to the editor of Residues – p.298 says it’s M. Wynn Jones; p.359 says M. Wynn Thomas – the latter is surely correct? As for any general reader likely to encounter this large volume, he or she will find it a bit heavy-going. This, I think, is principally for two reasons.

   Firstly, Thomas’s wrestling with the invisible presence – God –
has led to far too much repetition. At times he seems to be incessantly re-writing the same poem: a bardic ‘banging-on’ about the same thing, as it were. Yet, if one reads carefully through the volume, Thomas’s anguished searching – sometimes bitter, sometimes resigned – does cumulatively make the Presence palpable; rather like St John of the Cross, though never so beautifully or so musically. The second thing is that free verse in the hands of Thomas, as frequently with W.C.Williams, becomes a too easy option. The over-exercise of Thomas’s free verse, coupled with his frequent repeat performances, or dialogues with God, leads to dullness. This is how he wearily puts it himself, “bandaging himself with Yeat’s sentence about the quarrel within, he limped on through an absence of sympathy. His poetry was bitter”. This is from the volume The Echoes Return Slow (1988), in which each poem is prefaced with a prose paragraph (in lieu of a title perhaps?). And these brief inductions are full of interesting thoughts, like “Education
is the refinement of evil” or “Is God funny?”. But, as for the accompanying poems, they vary in quality. On pp.23,58,59 are
excellent whole poems, concrete and moving; while parts of other poems appealed to me also,

....I have watched
the tendrils of flowers with less strength
than a child’s fingers opening

the hard rock. You know what flowers
do best on. I think how the bodies
of the centuries have been reduced down
that this one should emerge, innocent of compassion.

   (The one who “emerges innocent of compassion” is Eichmann and
those of his ilk.) In another poem Thomas exquisitely offers a summatory self-view in a few lines,

... He lifted

the chalice, that crystal in
which love questioning is love
blinded with excess of light.

   In one place Thomas describes himself (so I infer) as “Casualty of the quarrel with strong men”, and in another place refers to Keats’ “the holiness of the heart’s affections”. This is his dilemma, he can see the greatness of strong men (non-doubters, believers), but he (who feels the numinous like William Blake) is too full of doubt: he wants to put his hand in Christ’s wound like the other Thomas.

   Another influencer in the argument is quoted, too, the Donne of
“No man is an island”. To which Thomas adds, “And yet on a peninsula one is never far from the sea.” For Donne, as Eliot said, thought was experience. But, though Thomas gets close to making the invisible visible, yet thought isn’t enough for him because,

The pretences are done with.
The eavesdropper at the door
is a fiction. The well-bred

Amens to the formal
orisons have begun to fade.
I am left with the look
on the sky I need not
try turning into an expression.

   Though he does so ‘try’. And try and try and try.

   The next collected volume, Counterpoint (1990), is full of the same confused difficulties and doubts: “Who can read God’s mind”; “Jacob wrestled to no end”; “He is the almost anonymous”, etc. If his principal topic was not so weighty, some might accuse Thomas of confusing poetry not only with self-expression but with therapy, too. One poem in that volume, p.89, seemed good having come straight from “the bush of the imagination we have set on fire”:

When we are weak, we are
strong. When our eyes close
on the world, then somewhere
within us the bush

burns. When we are poor
and aware of the inadequacy
of our table, it is to that
uninvited the guest comes.

   But as he says in the contemporary world context,

                   We walk
between blank walls, scrawled
over with the graffiti
of a species that has turned its gaze
back in, not to discover
its incipient wings, but the slime
rather and quagmire from which
it believes itself to have emerged.

   A great and thoughtful mind despite the doubt.

   Mass for Hard Times (1992) which constitutes the third section of this volume of Collected Later Poems, takes us into the period when Thomas’s wife had just died. The subject matter seems more varied and it contains a beautiful poem called ‘A Marriage’ beginning with the lines, “We met / under a shower / of bird-notes”. There are also, from time to time, examinations of the difference between the poetic and scientific perspectives,

                                  ... The scientist
brings his lenses to bear and unity
is fragmented. It is the hand saying

it is not of the body, leaving it
to the poet, playing upon his timeless
instrument, to call all things back
into irradiated orbit about the one word.

   In the next volume, No Truce with the Furies (1995), the poems
‘Geriatric’, ‘Fact?’, ‘Negative’, ‘Raptor’ and ‘Homage to Wallace Stevens’ are especially worth looking up. And, as it were, by act of condensation, he gets – where repetition seemed to have failed – the Presence experienced with fair precision,

                   ...Sometime
you are an impulse upon my walls,
at others a modifying
of unseen organisms, slowly
and delicately as a mutation;
but always as far off
as you are near, terrifying
me as much by your proximity
as by your being light-years away
                                                          (‘Near and Far’)

   Considering also that, at the time of this penultimate volume, Thomas had remarried, I was amazed to encounter the lines, “In life, as in love, / the second time round is / no better”.

   As for the final part of this collected poems – the volume Residues
published posthumously in 2002 – it is a fruit cake of slight and stray
bits. These lines, “Are the machine and the tiger / related by more
than a purr?” contain a factual error. Tigers do not purr – or so an
animal trainer informed me. Nevertheless, for his saying, from Residues, “Poetry is tha t / which arrives at the intellect / by way of the heart”, R.S. Thomas is almost certainly guaranteed immortality – as he may well be, of course, by those wonderful early poems about Iago Prytherch and his poems from Song at the Year’s Turning and The Bread of Truth.