Shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2017
As a poet, visual artist and essayist, David Jones is one of the great Modernists. He was an extraordinary engraver, painter and creator of painted inscriptions, but he also belongs in the first rank of twentieth-century poets.
Though he was admired by some of the finest cultural figures of the twentieth century, David Jones is not known or celebrated in the way that Eliot, Beckett or Joyce have been. His work was occasionally as difficult as theirs, but it is just as rewarding – and more various. He is overlooked because his best writing is embedded in two book-length prose-poems – In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, making it difficult to anthologize; the work is informed by his Catholic faith and so may feel unfashionable in this secular age; he was a shy, reclusive man, psychologically damaged by his time in the trenches, and loathed any kind of self-promotion. Mostly, though, he was a complete and original poet-artist – sui generis, impossible to pigeon-hole – and that has led to the neglect of David Jones: a true genius and the great lost Modernist.
This is the first full biography of David Jones, and Thomas Dilworth is the leading Jones scholar.
‘It is lavishly illustrated and wonderfully well written.’ Observer
Contemplating Eternity
Although I want to tell you about a poem, let us begin with objects. I would like you to come with me first to Birmingham, to visit the Staffordshire Hoard. These rich and intricately worked...
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