詩人簡介

R. S.托馬斯（Ronald Stuart Thomas, 1913—2000），威爾士詩壇泰鬥，20世紀英語世界最偉大的抒情詩人和宗教詩人之一。著有詩集20餘部，多次獲得各種詩歌奬項和榮譽，包括英女王詩歌金奬（1964），並於1996年獲正式提名諾貝爾文學奬。托馬斯終身在威爾士偏遠的鄉村教堂當牧師，自覺以自然和鄉村的寜靜、質樸來對抗現代世界的喧囂與虛華。他的詩跟他本人一樣，嚴謹拙樸，冷峻肅穆，厚重深刻。

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. 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. It begins with his autobiographical sequence The Echoes Return Slow, which has been unavailable for many years, and goes up to Residues, written immediately before his death at the age of 87. 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 is R.S. Thomas in a winter light, his fury concentrated on the inhumanity of man and modern technology, his gaze absorbed by the God he felt in Nature, but finding nourishment in 'waste places'. At the same time he writes with resigned feeling and immense insight, as well as grim humour and playful irony, of isolation, ageing, marriage and 'love's shining greenhouses'. For Thomas, 'Poetry is that / which arrives at the intellect /by way of the heart.'