David Jones

Christine Pagnoulle’s commentary provides a detailed study of eight among David Jones’s more accessible poems: those pieces in fact which he reluctantly detached from his work-in-progress and released for publication between 1955 and his death in 1974. It elucidates difficult passages, relates them to his other works, whether poems, essays, or drawings, and shows how David Jones’s vision of the world in the middle of our century bears on our present concerns. While developing orignal interpretations this commentary also integrates previous critical approaches into a comprehensive overview. It will thus be welcome reading for specialists of David Jones’s poetry, and will also be of interest to those readers who are discovering or still have to discover his work.

Christine Pagnoulle teaches English literatures and translation at the University of Liège; she translates contemporary poets as well as technical texts.  Her immediate professional interests thus cover the whole range of the written word.  She is particularly attracted, however, to those border-territories between poetry and fiction, as exemplified by the novels of William Faulkner or Wilson Harris, and by Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano to which she devoted an earlier study (L’Age D’Homme, 1977).