Echoes to the Amen: Essays After R.S.Thomas

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.