Allen & Unwin The Sleeping Lord book Poetry English Paperback 112 pages

Jones's visionary collection of poems and fragments published in the months before his death, reissued in paperback with a cover based on the artist's original design.

Published months before David Jones's death in 1974, and modestly presented by the author himself as a collection of 'fragments', The Sleeping Lord continued the exploration of themes begun by its predecessors Parenthesis and The Anathemata. Set mainly in different parts of the Roman Empire, either in the Holy Land or on the Celtic fringes, animated by his Catholic faith and by his own experiences as a soldier, formidably erudite and of a visionary intensity, the book springs from a lifetime's concern with questions of history, culture and religion. Mysterious, musical and alive with a sense of the wilderness and the elements, the poems show the startling development of Jones's imagination in his later years.

David Jones (1895-1974) was born in Kent. In 1915, then an art student, he went to war with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, where he fought in the battles of the Somme and Ypres. In 1922 he began a long association with the artist Eric Gill. In Parenthesis, based on Jones's experiences in World War I, was published in 1937, followed in 1952 by The Anathémata and The Sleeping Lord in 1974. David Jones's works are exhibited at the Tate Museum and the National Museum of Wales.