David Jones and the Question of Poetic Coherence: New Approaches to his Later Work

In The Grail Mass and Other Works by David Jones, editors Thomas Goldpaugh and Jamie Callison newly frame Jones’s mid-to late-career poetry. Their extensive archival labor re-organizes the material collected in Jones’s The Roman Quarry (1981), and supplements it with previously unpublished work, clarifying the context from which Jones’s The Anathemata and The Sleeping Lord emerged. Goldpaugh and Callison provide an opportunity to consider how Jones’s insistence on the fragmentary essence of his poems poses a significant challenge to influential critical ideas about the modern long poem as a genre. We are invited to question and re-think our expectations about poetic unity and coherence in particular.