News at Eleven: The anger and the sporadic cruelty

and contempt were real: an anger at the ease with which a historic culture could be betrayed and trivialised by those who should have defended it, a contempt for both Welsh and English who had colluded in this. And the religious poetry, too, cannot be boiled down to any simple formulae of contemplative passivity: RS's God is often as mindlessly savage as the owl sweeping down on its prey (a metaphor he uses more than once)--or else he looks on the earth with icy detachment or, worse, with a completely uncompassionate fascination.

from The Guardian: R.S. Thomas: Serial Obsessive by M. Wynn Thomas--review

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