Coming in from the open air

Selected Poems
by R. S. Thomas
Penguin Modern Classics, £9.99, pp. 368, ISBN 0140188908

Some 40 years ago, about to sit an entrance scholarship for Aberyst-wyth, I got hold of some papers set in previous years. One I have found it impossible to forget. It was a paper of literary criticism, only there were no questions, just a poem you were asked to discuss. And it got worse, much worse. The poem was a carol.

Poems I thought I knew about: they were puzzles. Poems allowed me to write at length, using words whose meaning I was not entirely sure about, like ambiguity and irony. Yet here was something so simple, so clear, it had to be a trick. I stared as balefully as a used-car dealer at ‘In the bleak midwinter/ Frosty wind made moan…’ I was 16 years old, and had encountered the sneakiness of poets.

Even at the end they confuse you. When R. S. Thomas’s Collected Poems 1945-1990 came out the book weighed in at over 500 pages, and even then was not his collected poems but only something like two thirds of them. Thomas had left the work of assembling them to his son, and the publishers Dent having stipulated 500 pages, 500 pages they got. Now the Bloodaxe Later Poems appears, the collection of his subsequent work, and that is 368 pages alone. Were everything he ever wrote to be assembled in one book, that would be well over 1,000 pages.

Yet this was not a poet who went in for epic verse, or, like his countryman Sir Lewis Morris, would address a sonnet to a Trades Union Congress in Swansea, and so fill out an oeuvre and in turn, behind glass, fill out mahogany book-cases in cold parlours.