R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) is one of the major poets of our time, as well
as one of the finest religious poets in the English language and Wales's
greatest poet. This substantial gathering of his late poems shows us the
final flowering of a truly great poet still writing at the height of his
powers right through his 70s and 80s. It begins with his
autobiographical sequence The Echoes Return Slow, which has been
unavailable for many years, and goes up to Residues, written immediately
before his death at the age of 87. These powerful poems - about time and
history, the self, love, the machine, the Cross and prayer - cover all
of his major areas of questioning. This is R.S. Thomas in a winter
light, his fury concentrated on the inhumanity of man and modern
technology, his gaze absorbed by the God he felt in Nature, but finding
nourishment in 'waste places'. At the same time he writes with resigned
feeling and immense insight, as well as grim humour and playful irony,
of isolation, ageing, marriage and 'love's shining greenhouses'. For
Thomas, 'Poetry is that / which arrives at the intellect / by way of the
heart.' Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 is the sequel to R.S. Thomas's
Collected Poems 1945-1990 (Dent, 1993; Phoenix Press, 1995), which only
covers his collections up to Experimenting with an Amen (1986). It
reprints in full the contents of R.S. Thomas's last five collections,
The Echoes Return Slow (Macmillan, 1988: unavailable for many years),
and Bloodaxe's Counterpoint (1990), Mass for Hard Times (1992), No Truce
with the Furies (1995) and the posthumously published Residues (2002).
It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. It was followed in 2013 by
Uncollected Poems and in 2016 by Too Brave to Dream.
