The Man Who Went Into the West, by Byron Rogers

The poet least likely to have a holiday home

Six years after his death, R S Thomas remains an esteemed figure in Wales, where Dylan Thomas (born a year later, and within 50 miles of his compatriot) is often considered an embarrassment. One poet boozed his way across the States, the other became a priest in the Church of Wales and moved, over his lifetime, further into the Welsh-speaking heartland. Beyond Wales, the priest commands nothing like the readership of the brilliant enfant terrible.

R S Thomas presents a biographer with particular challenges: firstly, to identify the very best poems of an extraordinary writer who, according to his second wife, "churned them out'' while sitting beside a wastepaper basket. "I burned three bags of poems after he died,'' she shockingly confesses to Byron Rogers. "I thought they were lousy poems, he did write some very bad poems.'' Secondly, The Man Who Went into the West might have penetrated the life's familiar set of paradoxes - the patriot who became increasingly militant about the encroachments of England but wrote poetry in the invader's language, spoke with a cut-glass English accent, and published the bulk of his work outside Wales; and the pacifist who frequently blasted his mother and his countrymen and appeared to condone the torching of holiday homes.

"What was he like to meet," Byron Rogers asks, promising an insider's view by weaving through the book his encounters with Thomas dating back to the 1960s. This has the virtue of avoiding the obligatory trudge through a subject's ancestry, but examination of the early years is disappointingly scant. Rogers places his faith in witnesses and, in doing so, produces a cut-and-paste job. Not only does he quote interviewees verbatim, including their opening "My name is...' but he also reproduces his own journalism at length.

As if to prove R S Thomas's contention that a poet is his poetry, "all else is gossip and trivia", the testimonies offer gems like "I sold him eggs. He'd call every Friday evening about nine. It was always half a dozen eggs,'' while Rogers's tone reinforces a preference for entertainment over analysis; he compares the poet to Julie Andrews in the opening shots of The Sound of Music, and likens the holidaying Thomas and his future wife as Ron and Eth of The Glums. Imagining how the poet would have reacted to his biographer's jokiness is one of the book's incidental pleasures.

In skimping on Thomas's childhood, however, Byron Rogers gets nowhere near the key relationship between mother and son. Thomas appears to have loathed the woman, and an appetite for distaste is everywhere in his writing. In a poem from the 1990s, he wrote that God "comes sometimes by way / of the nostril'', and Thomas did indeed write like a man with a smell under his nose. At first his parishioners were the offenders, by the end it seems to have been language itself. The result, an unwieldy body of compelling, rebarbative poetry, is quite unlike anything else in English verse. Alas, Rogers favours vagueness and labelling: Thomas was "a bit of a mystery", "strange from the off", a "nutter'', "virtually unhinged", "a mass of contradictions", "a bit of an oddy". Need biographies be quite so obvious, or should we anticipate a book about Quasimodo that tells us he had a hump?

Perhaps the ostentatious curmudgeon had this book coming to him, but the poetry certainly deserved better. Rogers cannot distinguish between the good, the bad and the mediocre. "This is imaginative writing of a high order,'' he says of lines from "Probing'' that include "How / tenderly did the woman handle / them, as she leaned her haired body / to yours?'' Clumsy line-breaks? Haired body? "H'm", to quote the title of one of Thomas's volumes.

The Man Who Went into the West contains some striking images - the poet at his desk in his damp retirement cottage with mould on his shoulders justifying Rogers's contention that Thomas was made for folklore - but, surprisingly, its subject is not the most vivid of Rogers's portraits. Both wives are, in their different ways, fascinating, while the manner in which Thomas's only child, Gwydion, reveals his complex relationship with his father is at times almost too discomforting to read. But we glimpse another side of R S Thomas when he attends a reading given by Christine Evans (to whom he had written a letter years earlier, which stopped her writing poetry for most of a decade). Returning to her seat, she tells Rogers, "he grasped my hand as I went past.'' This is, literally and metaphorically, a touching moment, proof that there is a lot more to discover about this difficult, distant man.