In Parenthesis

By David Jones
Preface by W.S. Merwin

"This writing has to do with some things I saw, felt, and was part of": with quiet modesty, David Jones begins a work that is among the most powerful imaginative efforts to grapple with the carnage of the First World War, a book celebrated by W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot as one of the masterpieces of modern literature. Fusing poetry and prose, gutter talk and high music, wartime terror and ancient myth, Jones, who served as an infantryman on the Western Front, presents a picture at once panoramic and intimate of a world of interminable waiting and unforeseen death. And yet throughout he remains alert to the flashes of humanity that light up the wasteland of war.

Reviews

This book is extraordinary and quite unlike anything else that I can think of. Not really reminiscence, certainly not a novel, it describes the rifleman's experience of trench warfare as a poet and artist recalled it twenty years later. . . It rings with a strange, oracular wisdom.
— Phoebe Adams, The Atlantic

Every so often there comes along a poet or scientist who can realize for us the new configuration, which only our time can see, into which culture seems to be shaped and the historical processes that shaped it. Jones is one of these.
— New York Times Book Review

This is an epic of war.... But it is like no other war-book because for the first time that experience has been reduced to 'a shape of words'. The impression still remains that this book is one of the most remarkable literary achievements of our time.
— Times Literary Supplement

David Jones's In Parenthesis, the great work to have spoken for the generation of the First World War, is rooted in timeless values. Jones retired into his dug-out where every small object had meaning and spoke to him of a 'real world' very different from what is so-called by the media-men, a real world in which, even on the field of battle, 'everything that lives is holy.
— Kathleen Raine

This work of a poet-painter has its every word chiseled out of experience, and it is probably the World War I monument most likely to survive.
— Stephen Spender, The New York Times Book Review

A work of genius
— T.S. Eliot

This work of a poet-painter has its every word chiseled out of experience, and it is probably the World War I monument most likely to survive.
— Stephen Spender

Also see:

The Fox in the Attic By Richard Hughes Introduction by Hilary Mantel A tale of enormous suspense and growing horror, The Fox in the Attic is the widely acclaimed first part of Richard Hughes's monumental historical fiction, "The Human Predicament."

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