R. S. Thomas is a religious poet, but what gives power to his writing is not his faith, but his fight to keep that faith alive. He is a modern puritan, with a gift for spiritual drama. He sees tragedy, not pathos, in the human condition, even now. He is one of the rare poets writing today who never asks for pity.

For these reasons, R. S. Thomas's poems have a flinty edge—an arrogance, even—that will not be popular with the sentimental. The evil that man has brought about on earth is part of the 'mixed things' of his making. 'I let you go,' God says in one poem, after having created the human hand, 'but without blessings.'

Thomas can be crabbedly ungenerous. Nevertheless, those contemporary poets Thomas unfairly mocks in his poem, 'Taste' [from Laboratories of the Spirit]—'the congestion at the turnstile...