Mass for Hard Times

R.S. Thomas has always posed difficult questions in his poems and forced readers to confront uncertainities, ambiguities and the equivocal and paradoxical nature of our experience of life. In Mass for Hard Times, he has drawn together a collection which encompasses all his major areas of questioning. Here are poems about time and history, about the self, about language and the writing of poetry, about love, the machine, the Cross and prayer. In many of the poems clusters of these concerns are movingly and unforgettably imaged in both familiar and new ways: the sea and ships, journeys and travellers, painting, mirrors, science and geological time are intertwined as he questions and reflects. What is most powerful and original here is the humour and irony of his voice, and his use of some of the classic structures of modern consciousness – the form of the Mass and liturgy, children’s rhymes, the seasons and the sonata.