In Parenthesis: Seinnyessit E Gledyf Ym Penn Mameu By: David Jones

Author: Harold Bloom

In Parenthesis tells, in the slang-vernacular of ordinary soldiers, the story of Private John Ball and his comrades as they travel from England to the Front, a journey that culminates in the assault on Mametz Wood in the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. Through his characters, Jones shares with us his own experiences, but he also harkens back to a time before his own – to the remote, shared heritage held by ancient myth. And so parade-ground oaths are fused with moments of mythic beauty, influenced by Arthurian legend, Shakespeare, The Song of Roland and notably the 6th-century epic Y Gododdin, which commemorates a doomed raid by Welsh soldiers into English border country.

‘For us amateur soldiers … the war itself was a parenthesis – how glad we thought we were to step outside its brackets at the end of ’18.’ Here David Jones alludes to the curious, if welcome, disconnect felt by those who were plucked from their normal lives to fight in the First World War. But he refers also to the ‘space’ between his own experience as an infantryman and the work it inspired: it was not until 1937, after almost 10 years of writing, that he published his remarkable In Parenthesis.

This ‘space’ makes his work distinct from that of poets who wrote during or immediately after the war. Jones turned initially to painting and engraving. Though he excelled at both, this was but the beginning of a long search for a form of expression. The result was something extraordinarily innovative: neither poem nor novel, In Parenthesis interweaves the qualities of each. In tune with the linguistic daring of the modernists, it was lauded by T. S. Eliot as ‘a work of literary art which uses the language in a new way’.

Bound in cloth
Blocked with a design by Ewan Clayton
Foreword by Harold Bloom
Set in Centaur
256 pages
Frontispiece by David Jones and 8 hand-lettered part-title inscriptions by Ewan Clayton
10½” x 7″