R.S. Thomas: Ministering Otherness

This article is built around a deeply personal `response to text' –of a poem in response to a poem, where both deal with notions of identity. For myself, writing poetry is a cathartic (though infrequent) source of resolution; a space subject to different constraints from those present in the production of analytic scholarship. A consideration of the broader ideological matrix at work behind the poems suggests links between nationhood and language, class and religion, private and public identity, history and politics. Vast subjects, explored but briefly in the thoughts and notes produced for this article as `background' to the story of the poem cited at the end. For legal and political theory it is a reminder of the delicate interstices of influences traversed in any assertion concerning broad policy. As `scholar' I am constrained in the provision of any further assessment of my own process as `poet': what is provided attempts honesty. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.