Counterpoint. This item is unavailable.Counterpoint

R.S. Thomas's Counterpoint is a ground-breaking book of poems. Its themes are familiar, but are given a pointed, contemporary significance: the challenge of scientific knowledge, the threat to the environment, language and the machine age, and more traditionally, love and waiting and stillness. Counterpoint is a visionary work, questioning the givenness of God against a suffering world. Now out of print in its first edition (1990) and subsequent printings, it is included in R.S. Thomas's Collected Later Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2004).

Thomas's work is austerely chiselled and uncompromisingly concentrated. It is powered by a deep religious passion which expresses a pained concern for all the victims of the greed and materialism of our age. He has a profound understanding of human loneliness and he sees, with frightening clarity, the connections between that loneliness and many forms of success . In Counterpoint, Thomas again shows a pained, articulate religious sensibility at work. Thomas takes familiar Biblical personages and imagery and in his own austerely energetic way gives them a new shock of life and intensity. The notion of counterpointing is pursued and demonstrated at different levels, not least powerful of which is the contrasting of these forms of spiritual permanence promised in Christianity with the littering, hyped-up forms of transience and disposability (everything from nappies to conscience is disposable with us) calling everywhere for our attention. Thomas asks: What is faith? What do we know of beauty? Pollution? Machinery? Do we carefully make ourselves immune to the ugliness in which we are immersed? How do we respond to the challenges of our own silence? We walk between blank walls, scrawled over with the graffiti of a species that has turned its gaze in, not to discover its incipient wings, but the slime and the quagmire from which it believes itself to have emerged. R.S. Thomas asks disturbing questions in a lucid and eloquent language. Counterpoint is a vital moment in the spiritual odyssey of a remarkable man and an inspiring poet. --Brendan Kennelly, Sunday Tribune