I'm surprised there hasn't yet been an obit here for R.S.Thomas: nobody
out there a fan? Not sure I'm exactly in that category but certainly
admire much in his work - particularly I suppose the way his poetry was
founded on deeply-experienced contradictions & evolved out of a refusal
of easy resolutions. To me his most interesting period was in the early
seventies when the struggle between opposites began to show up in those
unexpected line-endings, very subtle discontinuities. I'd certainly call
that 'innovative' & maybe the more interesting in that RST was clearly
not interested in innovation for its own sake. I'd like to quote a poem
here but damn it my copies of the books seem to have gone awol.
I saw him give a talk once when he was already quite old & apparently
not very well: non-stop for about an hour, without notes, utterly
fluent, a performance & a half. It was about why English people living
in Wales as I did should be deported at once, so it had a certain edge
to it from my point of view. I was surprised how unacknowledgedly
Marxist his argument was - for 'capitalist' read 'English', for
'exploited working class' read 'Welsh'. The fact that so many English
have been exploited in exactly the same way was apparently entirely
irrelevant as far as he was concerned. The interesting thing, of course,
is that he never allowed himself to sentimentalise the Welsh people
themselves - completely the opposite, in fact - which is the first of
the really hard edges his poetry sprang from.
Today's Guardian pieces stress his sternness etc but I witnessed a quite
bizarre episode which showed another side of him. He turned up in my
bookroom in Hay accompanied by a young I think Korean with a camcorder.
Somehow or other he'd agreed to let this guy film him in this or that
location - the last thing you'd expect him to do, but he was doing it
with great good humour & grace. Well well. I wish I'd been sent a still
of him standing under the faux-primitive necklace which hung from the
ceiling at that time but I never saw any of the film ... I guess stashed
in an archive somewhere.
AH
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