R.S. Thomas: Poems to Elsi - Softcover

R.S. Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1781721114 ISBN 13: 9781781721117

Publisher: Seren, 2013

Synopsis

This new centenary volume brings together 52 poems – 4 previously unpublished – by RS Thomas to his wife ''Elsi'', the distinguished artist Mildred E Eldridge. Together the poems reveal much of the changing (and challenging) dynamics of a complex yet vitally creative relationship.

Tender and honest at one moment, ironic and accusatory the next, there are poems on marriage, family, anniversaries and bereavement – offering up a candid portrait of emotional intimacy, the painful process of ageing, and of loss.

RS Thomas was born in Cardiff. Ordained as an Anglican priest in 1936, life in the rural parishes of north Wales became the inspiration for much of his poetry; it was in his first post in Denbighshire that he met ''Elsi''. He was awarded the Queen''s Gold Medal in 1964, and nominated for the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. A Penguin Modern Classics Selected Poems was published in 2004, followed by Bloodaxe''s Collected Later Poems (2004) and Uncollected Poems (2013). He died in 2000.

Damian Walford Davies teaches at Aberystwyth University. His latest poetry collection is Witch (Seren, 2012). He is General Editor of the forthcoming Oxford Literary History of Wales.

About this title

About the Author

Poet, literary critic and editor. He is Reader in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University, which he joined in 1997. His first full collection, published by Seren - 'Suit of Lights' - was a Wales Literature Exchange 'Bookshelf' choice for 2010. Alabaster Girls will appear from the same press in 2012. Damian's fields of expertise include Romanticism, the interface between literature and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, twentieth-century poetry, and the two literatures of Wales. He has a particular interest in literary cartography, and in the ways in which poetry responds to works of art. He is General Editor of The Oxford Literary History of Wales, and was one of the three judges of the 2008 Wales Book of the Year.

Edition details

• Publisher: Seren
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1781721114
• ISBN 13: 9781781721117
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 78