Collected Later Poems 1988–2000

Dent, 1993; Phoenix, 1995),

raw material of humanity’ – David Scott

‘Reading R.S. Thomas’s poems has become like reading the prophet Jeremiah…we find the same tenacity of theme and purpose; the ability to look without blinking into the misuse of the

He is the first great poet since the Metaphysicals of the 17th century to draw his images from the science of his day’ – Denis Healey.

Like Yeats, Thomas has produced his most powerful work in his old age…

For Thomas, ‘Poetry is that / which arrives at the intellect / by way of the heart.’

These powerful poems – about time and history, the self, love, the machine, the Cross and prayer – cover all of his major areas of questioning.

This substantial gathering of his late poems shows us the final flowering of a truly great poet still writing at the height of his powers right through his 70s and 80s. I

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) is one of the major poets of our time, as well as one of the finest religious poets in the English language and Wales’s greatest poet.