Lomography

Jonathan Polkest on R.S.Thomas - Poet

29TH OF March 1913 On this day the Welsh poet R,S,Thomas was born in Cardiff, "To describe the effect of his work it is enough to say that he often moves to tears, and that certain lines of his impress themselves instantly, and perhaps ineradicably upon the mind", wrote Kingsley Amis, reviewing Thomas's first volume of poems The Stones of the Field (1946) "His example reduces most modern verse to footling whimsey", Thomas was ordained as clergyman in the Church of Wales (the Welsh Anglican Church) In 1936 and his "bleak litanies"(the title of one of his poems) focus on the lives and landscape around him. A committed Welsh Nationalist, Thomas's poems nevertheless reflect his ambivalence towards the Welsh ("an impotent people/ Sick with inbreeding" he calls them in "welsh landscape) His poem A Peasant, introduced the archetypal peasant farmer Iago Prytherch, but Thomas was sensitive to the charge of either mocking or of pitying the common man, "Fun?,Pity?" he wrote in Iago Prytherch "No words can describe my true feelings" he was also troubled by religious doubt, retiring from priesthood in 1978 "Does God hear when I pray?", he asks in "Here" whilst in "Kneeling" he writes that "The meaning is the waiting"