When R.S. Thomas died in 2000, two seminal studies of modern art were
found on his bookshelves - Herbert Read's Art Now (1933) and Surrealism
(1936), edited by Read and containing essays by key figures in the
Surrealist movement. Some three dozen previously unknown poems
handwritten by Thomas were then discovered between the pages of the two
books, poems written in response to a selection of the many
reproductions of modern art in the Read volumes, including works by
Henry Moore, Edvard Munch, George Grosz, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte
and Graham Sutherland - many of whom were Thomas's near contemporaries.
These poems are published here for the first time - alongside the works
of modern art that inspired them. Thomas's readings of these often
unsettling images demonstrate a willingness to confront, unencumbered by
illusions, a world in which old certainties have been undermined.
Personal identity has become a source of anguish, and relations between
the sexes a source of disquiet and suspicion.Thomas's vivid engagements
with the works of art produce a series of dramatic encounters haunted by
the recurring presence of conflict and by the struggle of the artist
who, in a frequently menacing world, is 'too brave to dream'. At times
we are offered an unflinching vision of 'a landscape God / looked at
once and from which / later he withdrew his gaze'.
