The anathemata - David Jones

'The Anathemata can scarcely fail to be counted a great book.

It does what Epic is meant to do.

It gives a philosophic view, tenable for our times, of the secret places where nature finds reconciliation with the Divine.

' The Listener 'In Parenthesis is one of the enduring works that came out of the first world war.

The Anathemata is more obviously a poem, in the sense in which Pound's Cantos is a poem.

Both his books -- like his paintings -- have a thrice-distilled quality of finality and impersonality, like Gothic stone-carvings or the paintings on the walls of the Lascaux caves.

' Kathleen Raine.