False Moniker - In Parenthesis

Monorail Trespassing

the thing in question is david jones’ in parenthesis, a “lyrical epic that traces, via an alter-ego called John Ball, the contours of Jones’s own wartime journey, from his embarkation for France in 1915 to the Somme in 1916,” and “simultaneously contain[s] the contemporary and the ancient, the literary and the demotic, the realistic and the mythic”; one contemporary wrote of the work that “while retaining all the authentic realism of the event, [it] has the heroic ring which we associate with the old chansons de geste … a book which we can accept as a true record of our suffering and as a work of art in the romantic tradition of Malory and the Mabinogion” (source).

which is obviously a lot of grand talk, i gotta get my hands on the full thing and assess for myself, but in the meantime, let me leave you with the thing that prompted this discovery and this post: it turns out michael sheen did a reading of a sort of dramatic monologue from it, and it’s a very gorgeous thing to listen to, and very stirring if you like the sort of evocative lyric cataloguing that characterizes so much ancient poetry, which i really do! anyway without further ado:

while the sky split i remembered what he’d told me – the fighting had come to the forest, bullets and artillery burst the trees around him, sap superheated shards of wood, fiery splinters killing men left and right. he didn’t know who was bombing the place, and took a shiv of oak to the gut. he noticed he was hurt when the blood pooled in his left boot, and he saw the forest herself come bring garlands for the fallen. he left his rifle under the bough, and crawled away.