| Description | This was a second volume of poems by R.S. Thomas, assembled by Prof M.Wynn Thomas, the poet’s literary executor, from the manuscript poems left unpublished at the poet’s death in 2000. A previous collection had been published as Residues by Bloodaxe in 2002. In the event, following objections from the poet’s son to the publication of some of the poems, the collection was not published.
The poems in the collection are late in date in composition, mainly dating from the years following the publication of the last collection published in Thomas’s lifetime, No Truce with the Furies (Bloodaxe, 1995). Manuscripts of many of the poems in the typescript are to be found in the R.S. Thomas Research Centre’s collection, mainly in two groups of mss in the 2006 Poetry Purchase (the manuscripts grouped at RST/7/3, including ‘Prey’, and RST/7/4, including ‘Blackbird’) and the Notebook included in Varia at RST/9/24, the last of which contains the poems to Thomas’s first wife, Betty, which appear at the beginning of Prey.
Some of the poems in the typescript had in fact previously been published, e.g. ‘Voyages (For Lee McGowan)’ in No Truce with the Furies, p. 70, as ‘Navigation’; ‘Blackbird’ in Agenda 36.2 (Autumn 1998), p. 7; ten of the poems appear in the ‘Unpublished Poems’ section of R.S. Thomas’s Selected Poems (Penguin, 2003): ‘Easter’ (‘Paschal’ in Prey ts), ‘Alaska’, ‘The Shadow’, ‘Pause’, ‘Wisdom’, ‘Her Smile’, ‘Butterfly Movement’, ‘Resurrection’, ‘Montserrat’ and ‘The Spectator’.
An account of the manuscript poems in RST/7/3 and RST/7/4 and poems in the Prey ts is to be found in Tony Brown, ‘Prey and Other Poems: Some late unpublished manuscripts by R.S. Thomas’, Scintilla: The Journal of the Vaughan Association, 20 (2107), pp. 112-30 |