Cardiff: University Of Wales Press, 2008

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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 many 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 is 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 simply to explaining what actually goes on in them.

In fact, he offers his readings as 'a prose translation of the poems'. With a poet of such difficulty, and in relation to difficulties often Shoes Online deriving from what now appears very arcane knowledge, such a venture must appear ...
... to have its rationale.

Dilworth is capable, patient, hugely knowledgeable and always informative; and any reader of Jones will benefit from the identification of new sources, references, allusions and facts.

I was myself glad to learn, for instance, that 'the Flash' is a ribbon on the back of the collar of the uniform of the Royal Welch [sic] Fusiliers; although, by the same token, I am sceptical about whether 'Christ, mate, you'll all over' the last sentence of Part 3 of In Parenthesis, refers to the Germans: far more likely, it seems to me, to refer to trench rats.

The book also imparts some (although in fact disappointingly little) biographical material not available elsewhere; and it is very usefully illustrated with Jones's own paintings, engravings and drawings, and with some other contextual materials.

Even so, it is not entirely obvious why any poems need 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 sometimes 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 must seem a bit quixotic in relation to In Parenthesis which is actually written, in large part, in prose in the first place, even if it is prose of a highly specialized kind. On at least the first half of this work, as a consequence, Dilworth offers little more than otiose paraphrase; and the method seems altogether more appropriate to Jones's later work.

In addition to 'reading' David Jones in this way, Dilworth does, however, have one big 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 called 'intrinsic unifying spatial form' and it is identified in different ways in the major 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'.