Cardiff University of Wales Press 2008
Thomas Dilworth has already written extensively on David Jones, most notably in his comprehensive critical monograph, The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones (1988), and for a lot of years now he has been preparing a biography.
This book is the product of his deep and lengthy immersion in his topic; and so are both its virtues and its vices. It’s not, properly speaking, a further work of criticism or scholarship, but a devoted act of explication which reads all of Jones’s work, including the two Wedding Poems which Dilworth himself unearthed and added to the canon in 2002, with a view just to explaining what truly goes on in them.
The truth is, he provides his readings as ‘a prose translation of the poems’. With a poet of such difficulty, and in relation to difficulties normally Shoes On the internet deriving from what now appears quite arcane knowledge, such a venture have to appear to have its rationale.
Dilworth is capable, patient, hugely knowledgeable and usually informative; and any reader of Jones will benefit from the identification of new sources, references, allusions and facts.
I was myself glad to learn wedding invitations, for instance, that ‘the Flash’ can be a ribbon on the back of the collar of the uniform of the Royal Welch sic Fusiliers; though, by the exact same token, I am sceptical about regardless of whether ‘Christ, mate wedding invitations, you’ll all over’ the last sentence of Component three of In Parenthesis, refers to the Germans: far much more likely, it seems to me, to refer to trench rats.
The book also imparts some (though in reality disappointingly little) biographical material not readily available elsewhere; and it’s extremely usefully illustrated with Jones’s own paintings, engravings and drawings, and with some other contextual supplies.
Even so, it’s not entirely obvious why any poems want to be translated into prose. Readers who get interested in Jones surely also get interested in puzzling him out for themselves; and Jones’s own occasionally extensive annotation seems, precisely, an invitation to do so. The ‘poetry’ of The Anathemata in particular resides, at least in part, in its cryptic language.
Furthermore, Dilworth’s intention have to appear a bit quixotic in relation to In Parenthesis which is in fact written, in large component, in prose within the first place, even if it’s prose of a highly specialized type. On at least the first half of this work, as a consequence, Dilworth offers little far more than otiose paraphrase; and also the approach seems altogether far more appropriate to Jones’s later work.
In addition to ‘reading’ David Jones in this way unique wedding invitations, Dilworth does, nonetheless, have 1 huge interpretative idea which the book is Discount Shoes at pains to enforce. This is that Jones’s engravings for The Chester Play of the Deluge, made in 1927, set a structural pattern for the literary work that follows.
This, which is considered Jones’s ‘greatest innovation’ is known as ‘intrinsic unifying spatial form’ and it’s identified in unique methods in the key poems: as systems of reiterated imagery; as an analogous mode of structural ‘parenthesis’; as types of circularity, the ‘centric’ and ‘a chiasmic recession of circles within circles’.
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