The Page’s Drift: R.S. Thomas at Eighty

R.S. Thomas is one of the most important poets of the post-war period, ’the most resolute religious poetry this century’ (TLS). His influence on British poetry is enormous, while the variety of his themes: disappearing ways of life; man’s relationship with God; cultural imperialism; the crisis in Welsh identity; nature and the environment, has brought him a wide and popular audience. The author of more than twenty volumes, his massive Collected Poems appeared in 1993. The Page’s Drift is a celebration of R.S. Thomas’s eightieth birthday and his long writing career. The specially commissioned essays range across the Thomas canon, from his Welsh hill farmer persona Iago Prytherch, to a comparison with Dylan Thomas, to his unsteady relations with God. Admirers of R.S. Thomas’s work, and those coming to it for the first time, will find this book an invaluable and informative guide.