Reviews for Collected poems, 1945-1990

The average rating for Collected poems, 1945-1990 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-11-25 00:00:00 Rachellelle Liss R.S. Thomas was nicknamed the Ogre of Wales, rightly. He was a tangle of contradictions - the rabid Welsh nationalist who supported fire-bombing caravan parks, yet spoke with a cut-glass English accent and learned Welsh only late in life. His habit of preaching to farmers in freezing rural chapels about the evils of central heating didn't go down well either. He was, as my Mother said, a bit of a twp (Welsh: ‘dimwit’). The earlier work tends to be the best, especially the Iago Prytherch sequence. They don't flatter national vanities, but they're taut, evocative poems - 'A Labourer', 'Welsh Landscape' and 'Welsh History.' Thomas himself favoured the later work, which still strikes me as too abstract, too derivative of William Carlos Williams. It's true there’s a rather sunless feel to his poems, but that makes the flashes of brightness all the more moving when they do occur. Thomas's poems to his late wife and his sonnet 'The Bright Field' (a rare example of telling outdoing showing) belong in this category. Recommend the version published by Phoenix rather than Penguin.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-12-30 00:00:00 Jose �lvarez Ju�rez Is there a good way to write poetry? In the late Sixties, like many thousands of other unwashed urchins, I encountered RS Thomas at school in a slap-in-the-face poem that has puzzled me ever since. You remember Davies? He died you know With his face to the wall, as the manner is Of the poor peasant in his stone croft On the Welsh hills... ... The bare floor without a rug Or mat to soften the loud tread Of neighbours crossing the uneasy boards To peer at Davies with gruff words Of meaningless comfort; before they turned Heartless away from the stale smell Of death in league with those dank walls. (Death of a Peasant) In his capacity as an Anglican priest for rural communities, RS Thomas displays a proprietorial attitude to his own people, the real folk of the Welsh hills, but I am not convinced that he makes the mistake of assuming he is one of them. From my reading about Lloyd George for example, I imagine the Welsh as Non-Conformists when they are even Christians, to whom the Anglican Church was an imposition, representative of the landowner rather than the peasant. He does not even especially admire them. You failed me farmer, I was afraid you would The day I saw you loitering with the cows, Yourself one of them ... ... The two things That could redeem your ignorance, the beauty And grace that trees and flowers labour to teach, Were never yours, you shut your heart against them. You stopped your ears to the soft influence Of birds, preferring ... ... the shallow stream Of neighbours’ trivial talk. For this I leave you Alone in your harsh acres, herding pennies Into a sock to serve you for a pillow Through the long night that waits upon your span. (Valedication) When he speaks of an idiot in ‘The Fair’, he is brutally frank and sees this imbecile as representative of his people. The idiot goes round and around With his brother in a bumping car At the fair. The famous idiot Smile hangs over the car’s edge, Illuminating nothing. This is mankind Being taken for a ride by a rich Relation... Sure enough, Rose Cottage, the one pretty little sight in a terrace of simple red brick dwellings, is not Welsh after all, but home to the invader: ...It was registered in the heart Of a nation, and so, sure Of its being. All summer It generated the warmth Of its blooms, red lamps To guide you. And if you came Too late in the bleak cold Of winter, there were the faces At the window, English faces, With red cheeks, countering the thorns. (Rose Cottage) Thomas dislikes the English, or more accurately, he hates the way their sentiment and money has made fools of the Welsh. English money is alienating to his mind, English values are all wrong: . “...to make real the power of the pounds, / That in Wales would have gone rather / To patch up the family stocking, / Emblem of a nation’s despair.” (Rhodri) One senses that he is disappointed in the Welsh, that he sees them as a defeated people, slowly vanishing from their countryside, unable to endure its privations. ... We were a people bred on legends, Warming our hands at the red past... ... We were a people and we are so yet, When we have finished quarrelling for crumbs Under the table, or gnawing the bones Of a dead culture, ... (Welsh History) .... There is no present in Wales And no future; There is only the past Brittle with relics, Wind bitten towers and castles With sham ghosts; Mouldering quarries and mines; And an impotent people, Sick with inbreeding, Worrying the carcass of an old song. (Welsh Landscape) In A Priest to His People, as patronising a title as we could expect, he complains: Men of the hills, wantoners, men of Wales, With your sheep and your pigs and your ponies, your sweaty females, How I have hated you for your irreverence, your scorn even Of the refinements of art and the mysteries of the Church. ... You who are indifferent to all that I can offer, Caring not whether I blame or praise, With your pigs and your sheep and your sons And hollow cheeked daughters, You will continue to unwind your days In a crude tapestry under the jealous heavens To affront, bewilder, yet compel my gaze. One senses that his is not a satisfying mission. At the end of a working day, an angry line dismisses the people he serves - “I have shut the mind / on fools. The ‘phone’s frenzy / is over” (Swifts) - before releasing his mind to meditate with greater delight on the mysteries of swifts in flight about him. Being Irish, and subjected as much as anyone to the drivel of patriotic verse, I have to admire the Welsh for their national poetry, so harshly real and so concentrated on direct observation of the people within and as part of their natural world. His poem about WB Yeats is perhaps revealing. I have always distrusted Yeats, arguably Ireland's national poet, for his patriotism based on fantasy, the core of a more vicious nationalism in my personal opinion. Thomas speaks of sitting with Yeats on the train “in mutual silence closer than lover knit” and to my mind reveals that he has indeed nothing to say, no common ground with this glacial intellect. ... Who would have guessed the futility even of praising Mountain and marsh and the delicate, flickering tree To one long impervious and cold to the outward scene, Heedless of nature’s baubles, lost in the amazing And labyrinth paths of his own impenetrable mind? (Memories of Yeats While Travelling to Holyhead) RS Thomas has a very unsentimental and hard-nosed type of nationalism but I find it far more appealing than the alternatives I have encountered because it is so well rooted in the soil and hard rock of its own place. Maybe that is why I struggled with him in my school days. Something that is brutally factual can yield astonishing visions. I think this is a good way to mythologise a nation for its school-children and a good way, if there is one, to be a national poet. 'Listen, now, verse should be as natural As the small tuber that feeds on muck And grows slowly from obtuse soil To the white flower of immortal beauty.' 'Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer Said once about the long toil That goes like blood to the poem's making? Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls, Limp as bindweed, if it break at all Life's iron crust. Man, you must sweat And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build Your verse a ladder.' 'You speak as though No sunlight ever surprised the mind Groping on its cloudy path.' 'Sunlight's a thing that needs a window Before it enters a dark room. Windows don't happen.' So two old poets, Hunched at their beer in the low haze Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran Noisily by them, glib with prose. (Poetry for Supper)