Residues

When he died in 2000 at the age of 87, R.S. Thomas was still confronting the difficulties and uncertainties which beset us all with the urgency and candour of a much younger writer. In Residues, the poems are pared down in response to the metaphysical questions and contradictions he was still wrestling with. The enlargement of his concerns is built upon the further refinement of his technique. Residues shows 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 a spell woven / by consonants and vowels / in the absence of logic': 'Poetry is that / which arrives at the intellect / by way of the heart.'