Anathemata

Extract

In The Anathemata (Faber and Faber; 25s.) Mr David Jones has rewarded admirers of his earlier period—that of opaque paintings, taut images, rare incised or rounded box-woods—by presenting them at length with another major work of sacred art.

Anathemata: ‘things patient of being “set-up to the gods”’: for matter, thoughts stirring as often as not ‘in the time of the Mass’; for background, ‘the entire world of sign and sacrament’; for magnet and focus, the Body of the Lord.

Incarnation is here ‘no hint half guessed, [no] gift half understood’. In lieu of Mr Eliot’s ‘hardly barely prayable prayer’ we have an epic conterminous with recorded and unrecorded time, one vast eucharistic symphony, whose tempo is the velocity of thought; its music ‘unmeasured, irregular in stress and interval, of interior rhythm, modal’, moves stately as in breves, its tone akin rather to woodwind than to strings: ‘reeds then! and minstrelsy’. Great play is made with the more sombre vowels—‘the stone/ the fonted water/ the fronded wood’. Sharps are not to seek—‘if fifth the fire/ the cadence ice’, nor clash of consonants—‘skirted, kilted, cloaked, capped and shod’.