R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) is a major writer of our time, one of the finest
religious poets in the English language and one of Wales's greatest
poets. His output was prolific: over six decades he published some 25
individual collections of poems, as well as several volumes of prose. A
substantial number of his poems, however, have hitherto remained
uncollected, and often elusive - poems published in newspapers,
magazines and journals (many of them obscure), as well as in private or
limited editions. Uncollected Poems - published to mark the centenary of
Thomas's birth - brings together for the first time a rigorous selection
of the best of these. The fruit of several years' research by Tony Brown
and Jason Walford Davies, the volume makes available work which spans
the whole of Thomas's career - from an early sonnet to his first wife,
M.E. Eldridge (included in his first, unpublished, collection Spindrift
in the late 1930s) and an early Iago Prytherch poem published in the
Dublin Magazine, to poems which are powerful expressions of the
metaphysical meditations of his later years. R.S. Thomas's Uncollected
Poems takes its place alongside Collected Poems 1945-1990 (Dent, 1993;
Phoenix, 2000), Selected Poems (Penguin, 2003) and Collected Later Poems
1988-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2004). It gives readers of R.S. Thomas's work
access to much new and fascinating material. Uncollected Poems is a
companion volume to R.S. Thomas's Collected Later Poems 1988-2000
(Bloodaxe Books, 2004), the sequel to Collected Poems 1945-1990 (Dent,
1993; Phoenix Press, 2000), which only covers his collections up to
Experimenting with an Amen (1986). Collected Later Poems 1988-2000
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).
There is no overlap between the two Bloodaxe editions: none of the poems
in Residues, uncollected at the time of his death in 2000, is included
in Uncollected Poems.
