Examine David Joness The Grail Mass And Other Works Engineered By David Jones Presented In Ebook

on new archival discoveries, this book presents an authoritative reconstruction of David Jones's The Grail Mass, the unfinished and unpublished project from which came both his masterpiece The Anathemata a work described by W.
H. Auden as 'one of the most important poems of our times' and The Sleeping Lord and other fragments, his final collection.
With detailed commentary on the development and reconstruction of the text, this edition provides a full picture of Jones's literary endeavours over the second half of his life and further establishes his status as a major figure in the first wave of British modernist writers alongside T.
S. Eliot and James Joyce.

In addition to the text of The Grail Mass, this edition includes a number of unpublished fragments by Jones that emerged from this larger project, complete with textual commentaries.
I read this, reached the end, went back to the beginning and reread it,

This is a publication by Modernist Archives, The editorial statement claims Bloomsburys Modernist archives series makes available to researchers at all levels historical archival material that can reconfigure received views of modernist literature and culture.


This book cost me over two hundred Australian dollars, so I have to wonder what that at all levels means.
The first question to address then, is that if youre not an institution, and you save your pennies or cents to buy a copy, is it worth it

The answer,

in this particular instance, is an unqualified yes.


Firstly, its a wellmade book, Nice binding, boards, good paper, good font, It sounds daft, but there are familiar fragments in here, and they are much more enjoyable to read on good white paper in a clean font than in the slightly slurred font on stale paper that is my paper back Faber copy of The Sleeping Lord and other fragments To save time, hereafter TSL.


Secondly there is a lot of material here and some of it is in the not seen before category.
The Grail Mass is reconstructed as a coherent sequence/poem from Joness manuscripts into approximatelypages of text, Some of this has appeared before as published fragments, some was integrated into The Anathemata, but the presentation of the whole realigns the fragments.
More on this later.

There are two further sections of writing: one called A True fragment, an Extraction and A Variation, and the other Origins and Endings.


In total something likepages of Joness writing,

Theres also a critical apparatus detailing how the text was put together from manuscripts, how the versions here differ from other printed versions, and a guide of sorts to The Grail Mass.
My previous experience of critical writing on David Jones lead me to ignore all this the first time through.
This was probably unfair. Without the painstaking work of the editors I wouldnt be reading the book, but Jones tends to exceed his exegetes far more thoroughly than most writers.


However, quite unintentionally the Guide to the Grail Mass does raise one of the defining problems of reading David Jones.
The editors identify the speakers in the first three segments, Its hardly earth shattering.

But the effect of this simple piece of information on rereading the poems is like walking through an opened door into a realigned landscape.
The question, which I have no answer to, is given that the dramatic monologue is the basic form of several of these pieces, what did Jones gain by not indicating who is speaking, so the reader was orientated from the start

The next question: Given that Jones himself was unsatisfied with the project, and didnt feel it was ready for publication, does rifling through his files and reconstructing it, do his memory justice

And again, the answer has to be yes.


The editors claim that It is our contention that the parts forming the Grail Masscan be read as continuous and unified whole that can be judged on its own merit.


I think theyre right, The Grail Mass, as presented here, stands comparison with both In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, with two qualifications: it is obviously unfinished, and his speakers Judas, Caiaphas, his Roman Soldiers, humanise and ground the material in a way thats missing from The Anathemata.
Its funny in places, recognisably human, with all the poetry intact,

So youve got a copy of The Sleeping Lord and other Fragments, or The Roman Quarry, Do you need this book

Id say yes, Although Jones quarried the unfinished project and published fragments, they take on a new life when recontextualised, presented in the sequence they grew out of.
High Priests, grumbling squaddies and troubled tribunes add to, confirm, contradict and redefine each others views of the world in a structured movement that mimics the layering of detail Jones used in some of his paintings.
Buntings Then is now has rarely been taken so seriously and dramatized so thoroughly,

And, again, it sounds daft, but the reading experience is much more enjoyable moving through the sequence, rather than reading isolated fragments.


The versions published here are also different from those previously published, which allows insight into Jones working methods.


The irony of the books price is that you could give this Grail Mass to any reader of poetry, let them know who is speaking, and it could win Jones far more readers than those who have shipwrecked trying to read The Anathemata.


If you are a devotee of Jones writing, there must be one or two more out there, you probably need a copy of this book.
For once the content is definitely worth the daunting price of admission
David Jones is one of the finest modernist poets.
He was born in London inand was both a painter and a poet, His reputation as a poet rests largely on two works: In Parenthesis and The Anathemata.
The former is a deeply moving account of Jones experiences in the trenches in the First World War, In Parenthesis won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize in, In his preface to theedition, T S Eliot had no hesitation in including Jones along with Joyce, Pound and himself as a premier exponent of literary modernism.
The poem is a mixture of prose and verse and is accompanied by Jones notes, What stands out is the fundamental decency and humanity of those men as they made their way to the slaughter on the front line.
This journe David Jones is one of the finest modernist poets, He was born in London inand was both a painter and a poet, His reputation as a poet rests largely on two works: In Parenthesis and The Anathemata.
The former is a deeply moving account of Jones' experiences in the trenches in the First World War, In Parenthesis won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize in, In his preface to theedition, T S Eliot had no hesitation in including Jones along with Joyce, Pound and himself as a premier exponent of literary modernism.
The poem is a mixture of prose and verse and is accompanied by Jones' notes, What stands out is the fundamental decency and humanity of those men as they made their way to the slaughter on the front line.
This journey is described with such brilliance that the reader becomes immersed in the moment and almost forgets the horrors that await.
The notes are equally remarkable and could make a poem in themselves, W H Auden callled The Anathemata "Very probably the finest long poem written in English in this century" and it is a remarkable work, packed full of the 'mixed data' referred to above and providing a dizzying tour of our cultural past.
This too has notes provided by Jones and a long introduction which both explains and justifies the nature of its composition.
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