BOOK REVIEW / Stony sentences from life's dark book: 'Collected Poems 1945-1990' - R S Thomas: Dent, 25 pounds

THE POETRY of R S Thomas is a planet on which there are no soft landings. Over the years, his work has moved from a preoccupation with the hill farmers of Wales - parishioners of this priest - towards a greater exposure to the cold light of eternity. 'The higher one ascends,' however, 'the poorer the visibility becomes.' No estimate of what Thomas has done can escape the questions raised by his severity or, as some might express it, by the pleasures of acerbity, the rugged cross-bearing opinions, which are apparent in his verse. Why, they might even ask, their patience failing them, is he so cross?

He is a Welsh nationalist who is far from indulgent towards Wales. It is a place to be buried, where it is 'lovely to lie'. The reading matter of its inhabitants is 'trash', their hillsides a desert of spruce. Among them are oafs and yokels and sluts. The Welsh are preferred, though, to the intruding, carpetbagging English, who have corrupted them with their worship of money and machines, and with their foreign language, in which R S Thomas has written the poems we are reading. There are glimpses of a shadowy fighting past, of Glendower, and there are poems here that might almost seem inclined to torch the carpetbagger's holiday home.

There are solitary lives in these poems, and solitary deaths. Darkness falls, and rain falls. In one of them, a poet sends his work and is told to bury it 'as a cat its faeces'. To aspiring poets the muse shows a 'cold' face, just as a hill wife shows 'the cold seas of her eyes' to those sons and lovers who seek, and find, a safe island in her strength. Thomas's own poems are written in the 'cold' shadow of his strong and simple farmer, Iago Prytherch.

The beasts sold by his farmers for money suggest a 'shoddier altar' than the one that carries a crucified redeemer. Are we to think that the second of these altars is, or has become, shoddy? Many of the poems reveal a piety that is troubled by doubts and difficulties, and which attends to a cold God. Christianity's ancient strain of rejection is much in evidence; hope, charity and redemption have to be searched for. Thomas's poems say that we won't become dust when we die; there is a something after, which incorporates correction. God's kiss consumes.

One of the poems has an owl that is like a god 'gone small and resentful', and which is followed by the presence and absence of a different sort of deity:

He is such a fast

God, always before us and

leaving as we arrive.

This absconding god is also a human one, dark and inexplicable enough to seem a part of the poet's nature. Late in his life, God is a Rapunzel who lets down no 'visible plait'; 'the movement of a curtain', however, may have been detected.

Thomas's best poems are magnificent. Most of them belong to the first half of his writing life and are made of the stern stuff I've been describing. Those who admire his verse while objecting to his opinions can hardly claim that the opinions are missing from his best work.

Good poems don't have to be kind (though they often are). The poetry of the Anglo-Welsh George Herbert, for instance, is less consoling than we are apt to remember it: God's love is perceptible there, but so are the many from whom it is withheld. Herbert's spirit gasps: 'O show thyself to me . . .' Thomas's stuff may well be that bit sterner. It is a measure of his sternness that you feel so relieved when he appears to let up and to speak favourably - as at times in the austere and honest poems about his marriage - of the love that human beings feel for each other.

One of his most valuable poems, 'On the Farm', presents three ominous, backward labourers. Two of them at least are 'no good'. But there is a girl on the farm whose pale face is the lantern

In which they read in life's dark book

The shrill sentence: God is love.

I am not sure how much relenting there is here. Perhaps this is a fast poem whose meaning slips from your grasp. But it is very beautiful, and it seems to bring a kind of comfort.