Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

R S Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988‑2000, 368pp, £9.95
Bloodaxe, Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland NE48 1RP

Apart from re‑visiting old favourites in this handsome new
Collected, the other pleasures were in being introduced to, not
only to The Echoes Return Slow, but also Residues, the posthumously published collection of poems.
  
   Comprising a – surely poetic – prose passage and poem per
page, The Echoes Return Slow charts the life of Thomas from
young priest in wartime Wales and, in so doing, reveals the themes
that would serve as the poet’s staple throughout his creative life.
However, even in these more personally accessible – because
autobiographical – poems, the Thomas voice rings out loud and
clear…and pithily: ‘I was vicar of large things/in a small parish.’
(p23) He can be wonderfully withering on the social side of his
ministry, too: ‘here we exchange insults willingly’ and ‘I slide an eye at my watch.’ (p38). Wonderful, revealing stuff, recalling the barbed likening of our churches to: ‘…limousines in the procession/ towards heaven.’ (Counterpoint (p105)). Lines that make the eyes smile only.
  
   Yet contrast this with his real calling, amongst, for instance, ‘old
ladies/ stiff in their beds, mostly with pale eyes/ wintering me.’(p43).
Or in being taught how to pray by the ocean’s ‘rising and falling’
much like the sea of prayer breaking continually upon God: ‘not like
this for a few hours,/ but for days, years, for eternity.’ (p51).
  
   All Thomas’ work is a variation on a theme, of course, that
theme being God – or perhaps, more accurately, and more
interestingly, the unavailability and seeming absence of God in a
world increasingly monopolised by ‘the machine’. In ‘Geriatric’,
‘Fathoms’, ‘Raptor’ (No Truce With The Furies); ‘Migrants’, ‘Tidal’, ‘What then’ (Mass For Hard Times); and the four‑part meditation ‘Counterpoint’, Thomas wrestles with his faith. Yet in the latter collection’s concluding stanza, he settles for what faith he has,
reasoning, ‘that that little is more than enough.’
  
   In appointing M Wynn Thomas as his executor, the poet ensured
the bringing to light of a further cache of his poems in Residues. Out
of 57 poems at least 16 – to my mind – are up to the usual ‘finished’
Thomas benchmark, not bad going for a collection of poems in draft form. However, the collection has its own singular appeal because of its nature. Those characteristically whittled hymns didn’t just appear like that: Hope, perhaps, for lesser artisans? The themes in Residues are familiar too. Thomas has always extemporised his ‘conceits’ to investigate his one great theme in poems that frequently, and agonisingly, question God’s presence.
  
   Reading Residues – fittingly – over Christmas, the excellent short
lyric ‘festival’ (p335), demonstrates this point ideally: ‘the knuckles of the few fingers/ clenched upon faith.’ There are further tender elegies to his late wife, too, ‘Together’ (p315) and  'Matrimony’ (p318): ‘I said to her what/ was in my heart, she/what was not in hers.’
  
   This is a book well worth owning: surely an essential addition to
the shelves of keen Thomas fans, yet also helpful to those newer to
his work. In making The Echoes Return Slow more widely available, alongside the three central collections and the final poems in Residues, both sets of readers will benefit from the chance to chart Thomas’s poetic development.
  
   And last, but not least, the book, as a book, is also attractive and
sturdy, too. You tend to think R S Thomas would have valued that.