The Sleeping Lord

'<i>The Sleeping Lord</i> is perhaps the best introductory volume to Jones's work; the contours can be seen most clearly here, and the textures, though rich, are less elaborate than in <i>The Anathemata</i>, since there is an open, dramatic quality running through the book.' Peter Scupham, <i>New Statesman</i><br><br>Published months before David Jones's death in 1974, and modestly presented by the author himself as a collection of 'fragments', <i>The Sleeping Lord </i>continued the exploration of themes begun by its predecessors <i>In Parenthesis</i> and <i>The Anathemata.</i> 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.