I remember exactly where it was. On the top shelf of the new book section in the recently opened Waterstones, on Union Street Aberdeen. I had to use one of those round Dalek shaped stepping stools to reach it. I bought it there and then. How could I not?
It had been anticipated in The Listener a year or two before in an article about religious poetry if I remember right. Remember The Listener, that weekly cornucopia of media (TV and Radio) reviews, articles on culture, science and politics, essays on literature and music? I miss it and nothing has come close to replacing it.
Anyway, in 1993 I bought a first edition of the first printing of this handsomely produced volume, prepared and arranged by RST himself. The dustjacket features a landscape by his wife, M E Eldridge, and its austere and sparse landscape, in washed tones and more suggestive than descriptive, reflects the inner landscape of so much of Thomas's poetry. The book is a lovely example of the book publisher's aesthetics, and one of three poetry books I handle with an excess of care, bordering on reverence.
I have to confess that before the Collected Poems, I had read Thomas only occasionally, and mostly in the anthologised poems in interrogative mood. But that's why I was drawn to his poetry. There was something attractive in a man of faith for whom faith could never be propositional certainty or overly God-confident assurance. I had one or two of his earlier volumes, including Pieta. As a preacher I had found some of Thomas's apophatic theology a helpful contrast to and constraint on the preacher's temptation to say more than the text, and to claim more for the faith of the believer than is justified by elusive truth only partially known.
What I mean by that is not my preference for doubt over faith, but an acceptance that faith is not about all questions answered, it is more about all questions asked, however unsettling their asking. For example, the penultimate poem in Pieta, published in 1966, is titled, 'The Church'. It is one of his best known inner soliloquies, in the form of a threefold conversation:: with the reader, with the absent God, the Deus absconditus, and with himself as he sits in contemplative impatience waiting for any sign of the elusive presence. There is only one question mark in the poem. As the pastor and preacher lingers once the few congregants have gone home, he asks, "Is this where God hides from my searching?"
That poem has haunted my imagination all the years since I first read it. The reason is in its resolution at the close of the poem. There are few poets who have articulated with fiercer passion the unbearable tensions of faith in the crucified God. And the last lines of 'The Church' are amongst his most searing and searching explorations of Gethsemane as experienced by Christ, and as borne in the souls of all those likewise crucified between faith and doubt:
There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.
(Page 180, Collected Poems)
The publication of The Collected Poems was for me a personal literary event with ongoing repercussions. I became a student of R S Thomas, but a student whose primary disciplines were theology and philosophy. I began to argue with Thomas, to question his questions, at times agreeing to disagree, at least for now. The blurb on the back cover is for once helpfully astute. It was written by Brian Cox, poetry editor of The Critical Quarterly:
"R S Thomas's poetry is not without metaphoric brilliance, but he prefers a plain style, spare, unflinching, robust...His poetry uncompromisingly records the shifting moods of the believer, the moments of spiritual sterility as well as of epiphany... He is the poet not of Resurrection, but of the Cross."
And as a poet of the Cross he goes deeper than many a theologian trying to articulate the mystery of the crucified God. A few years after Collected Poems was published I led an ecumenical Good Friday service. We used 'The Musician',1 a poem uncompromising in its portrayal of sacrifice and personal kenosis as the cost of musical genius and virtuoso performance. Kreisler engaged in a form of self-crucifixion in the utter self-giving, indeed self-emptying, that a complete performance demands. If that sound like too many self compounds, that is because kenosis is precisely, the self willingly poured out, sacrificed for love of the other, whether Kreisler's audience, Thomas's erstwhile congregants, or a broken God-loved world witnessing the crucifixion of the Son of God.
Thomas is profoundly aware of the mystery of suffering, and is too good a theologian to ignore Resurrection as Cox seems to suggest. But while the Cross sits front and centre of some of Thomas's most powerful poetry, Thomas himself occasionally relieves the darkness with hints and clues that, if followed, bring the reader to a surprising moment of hope. For one example, the poem quoted above - he kneels quietly, if interrogatively, before an empty cross, untenanted because the dead body of Christ has been removed. It is no accident that one of the finest monographs on the theological poetics of Thomas is about Holy Saturday,2 the liminal time of silent waiting, the anguish and tension of the unknown, straining for the first sight and sound of the not yet happened resurrection.
There is so much more in the poetry of Thomas beyond such specific focus on the cross, and on the cruciform experience of the suffering God. But it is through the writing of these poems Thomas himself suffers an inner crucifixion of intellect and heart. In his best poems we are allowed to overhear the cry "Lord I believe, help Thou mine unbelief, and as we read him we accompany a modern reluctant Apostle, struggling to articulate an adequate account of the One to whom another Thomas eventually surrendered in the cry, "My Lord and my God!"
In the Collected Poems 1945-90 I found a book that gave me new ways of seeing, thinking, praying, preaching and fulfilling those crucial if costly acts of pastoral accompaniment. I have a long shelf of books on atonement, the Cross, and the mystery revealed and veiled in the crucified God. But my theological and pastoral education would have been much the poorer, and my own writing and speaking far less careful of the mystery that is human suffering, without regular seminars in the 'laboratories of the spirit', and 'experimenting with an Amen' in the company of this argumentative priest who nailed his questions one by one to an untenanted cross.
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1 This beautiful piece of calligraphy was created and presented to me by Mr Alistair Beattie following that Good Friday service. Alistair began writing calligraphy in a Japanese POW camp, in the same location as the writer Lauren Van der Post, with whom he corresponded for a time after WWII.
2 Saturday's Silence. R. S. Thomas and Paschal Reading, Richard McLauchlan, (University of Wales Press, 2016.)
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