Poetry
Song at the Year's Turning
R. S. Thomas · 1955
Synopsis
Poems of a mountain parish. One man keeps returning in them: Iago Prytherch, a hill farmer, who cuts turnips under a low sky and says nothing. The priest who watches him does not know whether he is looking at a brute or a saint, and asks him poem after poem without getting an answer. Around them, the rain, the sheep, the farms emptying out, a church where no one comes, and a God who is also silent.
Context
The collection appeared in 1955 from a London publisher and gathered the first three books by its author, which had appeared from small presses. A well-known English poet wrote its preface, saying that his own name would be forgotten long before that of the poet he was introducing: it was this book that got him read, whereas three collections had already gone unnoticed. The farmer who returns from one poem to the next does not exist; the man who wrote him said he had fabricated him from several parishioners, and he spent thirty years explaining himself to him.
Who it is for
About a hundred pages in English, translated into French in extracts. The language is simple and the poems are short; what they ask for is patience, not knowledge.
Prizes and reception
The book that made him known at the age of forty-two, and which won him the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature.