Reviews realm of financial abstraction so pure and rampantly absolute that none can truly come to terms with it. To put it another way, Pound would have been le just as confused and bere by the damage wrought by the financial logics of late capitalism as we have been. Taken as a whole, one of the great strengths of Ezra Pound in the Present is how it skilfully and subtly draws attention to contemporary matters such as these, while gesturing simultaneously to some of the different ways in which a sensitive reading of Pound might in fact afford us a stable critical vantage point from which to better understand modern literature and modern life more generally. U S A H David Jones on Religion, Politics and Culture: Unpublished Prose. Ed. by T B, A P-O, and K H S. (Modernist Archives) London: Bloomsbury. . xviii+ pp. £. ISBN – –––. Making available, for the first time, several unpublished statements by the artist, engraver, and writer David Jones (–), this volume enables us to better understand the contexts in which Jones operated and the ways in which these contexts developed his thinking and thus his literary and artistic endeavours. e bulk of the volume comprises four chapters, framed by a preface by Rowan Williams, an introduction by omas Berenato (Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia), and a conclusion and appendix by Kathleen Henderson Staudt, a signi ficant authority on Jones. e four main chapters feature, in order, a letter to Neville Chamberlain ( December ), edited by Oliver Bevington; an essay on Adolf Hitler ( May ), edited by Tom Villis (Reader in History and Politics at Regent’s University London); an essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins (c. ), edited by Berenato; and the transcript of an interview Jones gave to the Swanseabased Mabon Studios ( August– September ), edited by Anne Price-Owen (another significant authority on Jones) and Jasmine Hunter Evans. Additionally, the appendix reprints Staudt’s ‘David Jones: An Unpublished Appreciation of Gerard Manley Hopkins’, initially published in Agenda . (Autumn ), and the book features a comprehensive bibliography of the archival sources and published material consulted, as well as a thorough index and a selection of stills from the Mabon Studios interview. Each of the volume’s transcriptions is accompanied by a thorough, scholarly introduction and footnotes, which examine the history of each archival object, as well as elucidating biographical, historical, and literary contexts in ways readers of all levels should appreciate. Manuscript and typescript images are printed on the pages facing the transcriptions, giving readers access to both edited transcriptions and the original sources. All contributors concisely and helpfully introduce readers to key developments and debates in Jones scholarship, further enhancing the appeal of the book. ere are notable strengths across all sections of the text. Berenato’s introduction to the volume intelligently examines the relationship between Jones’s poetry and MLR, ., prose, while Bevington’s introduction and annotations to the Chamberlain letter make clear the development of Jones’s views from the time of the First World War to the time of the letter’s composition—as well as the limits of Jones’s personal perspective, and the ways in which this connects to the wider cultural and political conditions of the s. Similarly, Villis insightfully moves discussion surrounding Jones’s views on Hitler and Fascism away from polarizing extremes towards more nuanced analysis, sensitive to the complex political and cultural contexts of s Europe, as well as the realities of Catholic literary and intellectual life. In the third chapter, Berenato provides careful consideration of potential connections between Hopkins’s and Jones’s poetry and ways in which Jones may have related to Hopkins. ere are also numerous signs of detailed, impressive archival work and literary detective work by Berenato, documented in exhaustive footnotes tracing the development of this essay and associated documents. e interview transcribed by Evans and Price-Owen presents a ‘delicate exploration of the relationship between Wales and the nature of origins’ (p. ); and it is hard not to agree with Evans and Price-Owen’s conclusion that the interview ‘engenders a more nuanced understanding of the relationship that binds Jones’s own heritage and experiences to his outlook on...
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Dec 1, 2022
Anne M Carson 
Open Access