Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #314335 in Books
• Published on: 1995-11-06
• Binding: Paperback
• 111 pages

Synopsis
These poems, assembled shortly before the author's death in 1974, are all set in parts of the Roman Empire, either in the Holy Land or on the Celtic fringes. They are animated by David Jones's Catholic faith and by his own experiences as a soldier.

Customer Reviews

Jones's Final Masterpiece
The Sleeping Lord was the last work published by Jones in his lifetime, and reflected the final pieces that he wished to preserve from writings that had consumed him from before the publication of The Anathemata in 1952. Technically, these poems are, in the main, fragments of an abandoned long poem, but if that makes them sound like an artistic failure, think again.

Here we find some of Jones's most persuasive writing: a cry of despair in "A a a Domine Deus"; a vigorous depiction of a legendary pursuit (but also an affecting image of Britishness) in "The Hunt"; and the title poem, a haunting evocation of the British landscape. "from The Book of Balaam's Ass" harks back to the First World War (the subject of Jones's other long work, In Parenthesis). And the remaining poems, dramatic in conception, bear closer relationship to The Anathemata and the (posthumously published) Roman Quarry fragments.

New readers will find in this slim volume all the evidence needed to substantiate the claim that David Jones was one of the greatest poets of the Twentieth Century.