Uncollected Poems

Product Description

R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) is a major writer of our time one of the finest religious poets in the English language & 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 & often elusive
- poems published in newspapers magazines & 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 & 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- from an early sonnet to his first wife M.E. Eldridge (included in his first unpublished collection Spindrift in the late 1930s) & an early Iago Prytherch poem published in the Dublin Magazine to poems which are powerful expressions of the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) & Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 (Bloodaxe Books 2004). It gives readers of R.S. Thomas's work access to much new & 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) & Bloodaxe's Counterpoint (1990) Mass for Hard Times (1992) No Truce with the Furies (1995) & 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.