Последние издания книг Рональда Стюарта Томаса

When R.S. Thomas died in 2000, two seminal studies of modern art were found on his bookshelves - Herbert Read's Art Now (1933/1948) 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, René 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'.

Published to mark the poet's 80th birthday, this collection confirms R. S. Thomas as our pre-eminent poet.

`Read these poems', Stephen Spender

`This is the book I've been waiting for', Ted Hughes

" Comprising a – surely poetic – prose passage and poem per page, The Echoes Return Slow charts the life of Thomas from young priest in wartime Wales and, in so doing, reveals the themes that would serve as the poet’s staple throughout his creative life.

However, even in these more personally accessible – because autobiographical – poems, the Thomas voice rings out loud and clear…and pithily: ‘I was vicar of large things/in a small parish.’ (p23) He can be wonderfully withering on the social side of his ministry, too: ‘here we exchange insults willingly’ and ‘I slide an eye at my watch.’ (p38). Wonderful, revealing stuff, recalling the barbed likening of our churches to: ‘…limousines in the procession/ towards heaven.’ (Counterpoint (p105)). Lines that make the eyes smile only.

Yet contrast this with his real calling, amongst, for instance, ‘old
ladies/ stiff in their beds, mostly with pale eyes/ wintering me.’(p43). Or in being taught how to pray by the ocean’s ‘rising and falling’ much like the sea of prayer breaking continually upon God: ‘not like this for a few hours,/ but for days, years, for eternity.’ (p51)."

[Michael di Placido]