(This review first appeared in Poetry Wales 21.4 (1986) pp. 102-104.)
A new collection by R. S. Thomas is a thing to be approached with a keen sense of anticipation. To a poet you encounter for the first time, you bring a mind with a blank space ready for inscription. Matters are otherwise with a poet you seem to have been reading all your adult life – a writer whose style and mannerisms, themes and obsessions, and what (for want of a better word) is usually termed his "development", already occupy a sizeable niche in your consciousness. I have to report, then, a sense of disappointment with the eighteen poems that make up this handsome volume. It isn’t that I think them particularly poor poems; but none seems particularly distinguished either. In my judgement this collection would put up no candidates for an anthology of the fifty best poems by this poet.
Someone who's been writing as long as R. S. Thomas must be assumed to have developed a facility in poem-making. Such a facility is plainly of great value; yet it should also be regarded – by its possessor, I mean – with a degree of suspicion. For it's not unlikely that the possessor of this faculty will find it making poems for him when he has little or nothing new to say. He's then liable to produce what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls "Parnassian" – verse highly characteristic of its author but lacking in the imaginative pressure that informs his best work.
Now Thomas has had a good deal to say; and I for one wouldn't be surprised if he was unable to carry any further that gripping exploration which, emerging in Laboratories of the Spirit, has occupied many pages of subsequent books. He has trod the plank above the void: but I don’t think it's in his nature to step off it into nothingness – to commit himself, that is, to an existentialist or existential position. The poems included in Destinations (despite the book's title) add nothing new to that exploration and suggest, indeed, a sensibility pretty much at ease with itself. Thomas, you may feel, deserves, if anybody does, a spot of ease; but it's the tension within the poems and between poems in his later books that generates (in both poems and books) much of their fascination and power. To travel interestingly, it's sometimes said, is better than to arrive, and though I wouldn't say that Thomas has actually arrived (for arrival, for a poet, may well mean silence), he seems nearer the terminus in Destinations than in any of his other collections of the last decade.
Hopkins wrote to his friend Baillie: "I believe that when a poet palls on us it is because of his Parnassian. We seem to have found out his secret." R. S. Thomas's Parnassian seems to me to manifest itself in Destinations in a number of ways. There is the somewhat mechanical appearance of familiar metaphors. In "The Message", for example, a bird administers to the poet the "injection" of the following divine message:
I gave you the X-ray
eye for you to use, not
to prospect, but to discover
the unmalignancy of love's
growth. You were a patient, too,
anaesthetised on truth's table,
with life operating on you
with a green scalpel...
Here I'm troubled by the apparent antithesis of "to prospect" and "to discover" – since prospecting is often a natural prelude to discovery; then the idea of someone needing an "X-ray / eye" to tell him that love is "unmalignant" (who normally thinks that?) is odd to say the least; while the final metaphor is half R. S. T., half T. S. E.
Then there's Thomas's liking for the first person plural – the one speaking on behalf of the many. In his early poetry this worked well as a tactic of provocation, but in "Bequest" it seems to me to overreach in attempting to link politics and religion. The poem ends:
Somewhere from under an old
dustbin lid you will have emerged
for the re-assembling of the species.
We have left you nothing
but the consequences of our refusal
to sit down by the still pool
in the mind, waiting for the unknown
visitant's quickening of its surface.
Either "you will emerge" or "you have emerged" (said, I take it, of God) would make sense, but "you will have emerged" is curiously vague, self-neutralizing. The last sentence, with the deliberate obscurity of "nothing / but the consequences of our refusal…" seems to me to opt for spurious resonance rather than responsible and difficult definition.
Elsewhere the writing lapses into prepositional clumsiness:
...his angling for connivance
at the helplessness of his merriment
at his own jokes...
or descends into solecism:
Can one make love
to a kitten?
A question best not answered, perhaps… For me, the most successful poem in Destinations is the simplest. In "The Other", lying awake listening to night sounds, the poet is led to think
of that other being who is awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.
The bareness and directness of this language seem guarantors of its authenticity.
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