Ariane Bankes
Front Lines
When the artist David Jones’s book-length meditation on the Great War, In Parenthesis, was published in 1937 by Faber, it established him immediately as one of the most singular poets of the day. T S Eliot, who championed Jones at Faber, was delighted to discover in this ‘work of genius’ an entirely original voice, one that combined a startling modernism with a sensibility drenched in myth and history. The 40,000-word epic of prose and verse that reimagined Jones’s experiences as a private at the Western Front with extraordinary immediacy and depth was garlanded with praise, winning the Hawthornden Prize in 1938, then the only literary prize worth winning.
By the late 1920s David Jones was already considered England’s foremost engraver and an artist of note: Ben Nicholson set about recruiting him for the Seven and Five Society (members included Nicholson’s wife Winifred, Christopher Wood and Barbara Hepworth), and he was starting to exhibit with success in London’s major
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Humans may be the supremely musical animal, but, with or without us, this is a musical planet.'
@MathewJLyons on how music on earth began.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/symphony-of-a-thousand-millennia
'In 2007, German scientists analysed the soil of this lunar landscape and found that 17 per cent of its weight was made up of arsenic. The ground wasn’t poisoned – it was poison.'
http://ow.ly/Ck7j50Er3mu
'Rivalries are intense and dangerous, and someone has to die.'
@NJCooper_crime on new thrillers by @HenryCPorter, @k_faulkner, @annafbailey, @mserinkelly, @JoelDicker, @AlanJParks, @whartonswords and more.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/april-2021-crime-round-up