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With a title as enticing as much of its content, Echoes to the Amen: Essays After R.S. Thomas is the first collection of essays to appear since the poet’s death. The key word after captures both the sense of having lost one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century and the need to assess that significance through an impressive range of critical and comparative approaches; and also the sense of how that critical landscape lies following his departure.
All of the essays here seek to challenge Robert Minhinnick’s deliberately provocative statement: ‘R.S. Thomas the cultural icon has eclipsed R.S. Thomas the poet’. Patrick Crotty argues persuasively that the famous Prytherch sequence is as much about the ‘poetic act’ as it is about a certain cultural position; and he begins the exploration of Thomas’s central concern: the question of faith. John Barnie boldly argues for a poet attempting to escape what he calls the ‘baggage of theology’, whilst Geoffrey Hill, M. Wynn Thomas and Rowan Williams offer more subtly nuanced readings of Thomas as a follower of Kierkegaard, a post-ethical Christian. John Pikoulis, in impressively tracing Thomas’s use of the star as a trope, suggests that ‘the deus is no longer ex but in machina’ for the poet.
For Pikoulis, as for many of the readings here, Thomas is a poet in the Romantic tradition: ‘the poet is not in control of his poetry; he is driven by it’. Yet, for me, the best essays here, adding new dimensions to our understanding of the work, are those which see him precisely as a poet in control of language. Without collapsing key differences, Tony Brown presents a (post)-modern, self-reflexive Thomas in an illuminating comparison with Wallace Stevens. Katie Gramich, in similarly comparative manoeuvres with Sylvia Plath and psychoanalytical feminist criticism, offers important new ways of understanding Thomas’s oft noted fascination with mirror imagery. She shares with Damian Walford Davies a keen sense of what he explores in his essay: Thomas as ‘inveterate and mordant punster’. Both find in the fabric of his language, as he arguably found in both the limits and endless potential of language itself, a way for Thomas to explore contradictions and paradoxes not otherwise easily resolved: for Gramich the sense of ‘a self-obsessed speaker trying to escape the self’; for Davies a poet ‘simultaneously expressing scepticism, wistfulness, [and] contentment’ both with his God and his country.
The names here alone, and the fact that such differing views can be held, are by themselves – in a pun, which, as Davies might remind us, Thomas himself would have enjoyed – a testament to R.S. Thomas’s lasting and growing significance. This collection demonstrates clearly that the poet has as much, and more, to say to us than the cultural icon.
Paul Wright
It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgement should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.
Gellir defnyddio’r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatad Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.
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Further Information: Echoes to the Amen:
Essays After R. S. Thomas
Edited by Damian Walford Davies
pp xvi233 December 2003 hardbackISBN 0-7083-1789-8
•Contents
•Contributors
Echoes to the Amen is the first collection of critical essays dealing with the work of R.S. Thomas to appear since his death in September 2000. Nine essays consider the achievement and legacy of one of the great poets of the twentieth century, offering a broad and detailed assessment of the full range of Thomas’s distinguished career, which can now be seen whole. The volume presents stimulating new readings of the poet’s central preoccupations as well as discussions of hitherto neglected themes, and examines the ways in which Thomas negotiated painful cultural, spiritual and emotional tensions.
Thomas’s ironic anti-pastorals, his poems of filial resentment, his bold charting of the new cosmos, obsessive punning and dialogues with Wallace Stevens and Kierkegaard are among the subjects explored in these essays, which emphasise both the diversity and the underlying unity of Thomas’s work. Essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century poetry and contemporary Welsh writing in English, Echoes to the Amen allows us to see how the concerns of this icon of modern Wales illuminate a global predicament.
Damian Walford Davies is Lecturer in Romantic and Victorian literature in the English Department at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
Contents
A Note on Texts
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
•Extraordinary Man of the Bald Welsh Hills: The Iago Prytherch Poems PATRICK CROTTY
•R. S. Thomas’s Welsh Pastoral GEOFFREY HILL
•Was R. S. Thomas an Atheist Manqué? JOHN BARNIE
•‘The Curious Stars’: R. S. Thomas and the Scientific Revolution JOHN PIKOULIS
•‘Blessings, Stevens’: R. S. Thomas and Wallace Stevens TONY BROWN
•Mirror Games: Self and M(O)ther in the Poetry of R. S. Thomas KATIE GRAMICH
•‘Double-entry Poetics’: R. S. Thomas – Punster DAMIAN WALFORD DAVIES
•‘Time’s Changeling’: Autobiography in The Echoes Return Slow M. WYNN THOMAS
•Suspending the Ethical: R. S. Thomas and Kierkegaard ROWAN WILLIAMS
Bibliography
Index
Notes on Contributors
JOHN BARNIE was born in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire. He taught in the English Department of Copenhagen University from 1969 to 1982, becoming assistant editor of the cultural magazine Planet: The Welsh Internationalist in 1985 and editor in 1990. A well-known commentator on political and environmental issues, he is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, fiction and essays, including The King of Ashes (Gomer, 1989), The City (Gomer, 1993), No Hiding Place: Essays on the New Nature and Poetry (University of Wales Press, 1996) and most recently Ice (Gomer, 2001), a novel in verse.
TONY BROWN is Reader in English at the University of Wales, Bangor, where he is also co-director of the R. S. Thomas Study Centre. His work on R. S. Thomas includes the co-editing with Bedwyr Lewis Jones of Pe Medrwn yr Iaith ac Ysgrifau Eraill (1988), several articles, and a forthcoming monograph in the Writers of Wales series. He has also written widely on other Welsh writers in English, most notably Glyn Jones, whose Collected Stories and seminal study, The Dragon has Two Tongues, he edited in 1999 and 2001 (both University of Wales Press). He is the editor of Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays.
PATRICK CROTTY is Professor of Irish and Scottish Literary History at the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages at the University of Ulster’s Magee campus. He has published many articles on Irish and Scottish poetry and on Welsh writing in English and is a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. His translations from seventeenth-, eighteenth- and twentieth-century Irish verse have appeared in many anthologies. He is editor of Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology (Blackstaff Press, 1995) and recent publications include essays on the fiction of John McGahern and the songs of Bob Dylan. He is currently editing The New Penguin Book of Irish Verse and is co-editor with Alan Riach of the annotated three-volume Complete Collected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid (Carcanet Press).
KATIE GRAMICH is a Literature Staff Tutor with the Open University. Born in Ceredigion, she received her education at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and at the universities of London and Alberta. She has published widely on Welsh writing in English and has a particular interest in women’s literature. She has edited Allen Raine’s Queen of the Rushes (Honno, 1998) and Amy Dillwyn’s The Rebecca Rioter (Honno, 2001), and co-edited Dangerous Diversity: The Changing Faces of Wales (University of Wales Press, 1998) and Welsh Women’s Poetry, 1460–2001: An Anthology (Honno, 2003).
GEOFFREY HILL, born in 1932 in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, is University Professor, Professor of Literature and Religion, and co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an Honorary Fellow of both Keble College, Oxford, and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His scholarly and critical works include The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (André Deutsch, 1984), The Enemy’s Country: Words, Contexture, and Other Circumstances of Language (Stanford University Press, 1991) and Style and Faith: Essays (Counterpoint Press, 2003). Widely admired as one of the most distinguished English poets of the twentieth century, he is the author of For the Unfallen (1959), King Log (1968), Mercian Hymns (1971), Tenebrae (1978), The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983), New and Collected Poems, 1952–1992 (1994), Canaan (1996), The Triumph of Love (1998), Speech! Speech! (2000) and The Orchards of Syon (2002), the last two published by Counterpoint Press.
JOHN PIKOULIS is Senior Lecturer in English Literature in Cardiff University’s Centre for Lifelong Learning. He is the author of The Art of William Faulkner (Macmillan, 1982) and Alun Lewis: A Life (Seren, 1992), and editor of Alun Lewis, A Miscellany of his Writings (Poetry Wales Press, 1982). He has published numerous articles on aspects of English literature from Walter Scott to Louis MacNiece and, in the field of Welsh writing in English, on R. S. Thomas, Edward Thomas, Lynette Roberts, Lewis Jones and Glyn Jones. He is co-chair of Academi, the Welsh Literature promotion agency, and founder chair of the University of Wales Association for Welsh Writing in English, for whom he is series editor of a number of Collected Works.
M. WYNN THOMAS, literary executor of the unpublished work of R. S. Thomas, is Professor of English and Director of CREW (Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales) at the University of Wales, Swansea. He is the author or editor of twenty books (in both Welsh and English) on American literature (Walt Whitman in particular) and on the two literatures of modern Wales, including The Page’s Drift: R. S. Thomas at Eighty (Seren, 1992), Internal Difference: Twentieth-Century Writing in Wales (University of Wales Press, 1992), Corresponding Cultures: The Two Literatures of Wales (University of Wales Press, 1999) and studies of Morgan Llwyd, John Ormond and James Kitchener Davies. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.
DAMIAN WALFORD DAVIES is Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is the author of Presences that Disturb: Models of Romantic Identity in the Literature and Culture of the 1790s (University of Wales Press, 2002) and a number of articles on Romantic and Victorian literature and on the two literatures of Wales. He is the editor of Waldo Williams: Rhyddiaith (University of Wales Press, 2001; winner of the 2002/2003 Sir Ellis Griffith and L. W. Davies Prizes) and of William Wordsworth: Selected Poems (Dent, 1994), and co-editor of The Monstrous Debt: Modalities of Romantic Influence in Twentieth-Century Literature (Wayne State University Press, forthcoming). He is currently preparing the ‘Penguin English Poets’ edition of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
ROWAN WILLIAMS is Archbishop of Canterbury. He was born in Swansea and studied theology at Cambridge. After research at Oxford in Russian religious thought, he worked as a priest and teacher of theology for seventeen years, becoming Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford in 1986. From 1992 to 2002 he was Bishop of Monmouth, and from 1999 to 2002 Archbishop of Wales. A Fellow of the British Academy, he is the author of several books, including The Wound of Knowledge (1979; 2nd edn, 1990); The Truce of God (1983); Arius: Heresy and Tradition (1987; 2nd edn, 2001); Teresa of Avila (1991; 2nd edn, 2000); Open to Judgement: Sermons and Addresses (1994); On Christian Theology (1999); Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (2000); Christ on Trial (2000); and Writing in the Dust: Reflections on 11 September and its Aftermath (2000). He has published a number of articles on R. S. Thomas, Vernon Watkins and other English-language Welsh writers, as well as three collections of poetry, the latest being The Poems of Rowan Williams (Perpetua Press, 2002). |
