IN PARENTHESIS
seinnyessit e gladys ym penn maue

DAVID JONES

FABER & FABER LTD., LONDON
1955

"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.

With the outbreak of the First World War, Jones enlisted in the London Welsh Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers on 2 January 1915 and served on the Western Front in 1915–1918 with the 38th (Welsh) Division. Jones spent more time on the front line (117 weeks) than any other British writer in the war. He was wounded at Mametz Wood, recuperated in the Midlands, was returned to the Ypres Salient, and joined in the attack on Pilckem Ridge at Passchendaele in 1917. Jones's wartime experience was the basis for this work.

22 x 15 cm. xv + 226 pp + frontispiece, endpiece and map plate.

A reading or binding copy. Ex-library, stamped on the front free endpaper and colophon page the rest of the contents are clean and tidy. Backstrip roughly repaired with clear tape, cloth fraying on the fore-edge of the boards.