The man who went into the west : the life of R.S. Thomas

Byron Rogers' first biography, of the novelist and publisher J.L.

Carr, was read on "Book of the Week", reprinted twice, sold 5,000 copies in hardback and was hailed by Simon Jenkins in "The Times" as 'a miniature masterpiece of social history'.

For his second biography, Rogers - a Welshman who moved to England - has found the perfect subject: the great Welsh poet R.S.

Thomas (an English-educated man who set out to become more and more Welsh throughout his life).

Thomas is now accepted, along with Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney, as one of the great post-war British poets.

All his life he was a minister in the Church of Wales, at a succession of increasingly remote country parishes.

He had a reputation for being an austere, unforgiving, taciturn, wintry man.

Now Byron Rogers has unearthed the amazing story of this man's life, and that of his household - one both comic, absurd and touching.

Here is a man who banned Hoovers from his house on grounds of noise, whose first act on moving into an ancient cottage was to rip out the central heating, whose attempts to seek out more authentically Welsh parishes only brought him more into contact with loud English holidaymakers. To Thomas' many admirers, this will be a surprising, sometimes shocking, but at last humanising portrait of someone who wrote truly metaphysical poetry.