"At his death in 2000, R.S. Thomas was widely considered to be one of the major poets of the English-speaking world and had been nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature. An outspoken Welsh nationalist, he was also for many years a priest in the Anglican Church in Wales. At the same time his later poetry, considered by many as amongst the finest religious poetry written in the twentieth century, is frequently a profound and anguished search for an elusive God in our contemporary world of globalized consumerism and technology."

"Tony Brown's study discusses the whole range of R.S. Thomas's writing - his poetry of the life of hill farmers in mid Wales, his often vigorous and controversial political poetry, and his later poetry of spiritual searching - and sees Thomas's perspective as consistently that of the outsider, isolated and unsure of his own identity, seeking a way of life where he could feel at home and culturally secure. As well as providing an introduction to R.S. Thomas's writing, Tony Brown's reading of Thomas's life and work also provides a range of new perspectives and insights, many based on uncollected or unpublished material, for readers already familiar with the poetry."--Jacket.