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If I recall right Jones lived for the last 20 years of his life in a single
room lodging, almost never going out, chain-smoking, but always welcoming
visitors. I deeply disagreed with his political and religious views but
loved the intensity, the luminosity,  of vision in both his visual and
verbal art. William Feaver's book 'The Pitmen Painters', on the Ashington
Group of coal-mining visual artists, records some the Ashington artists and
Jones, entre deux guerres. There's a wartime (WWII) anthology for troops
called 'The Knapsack', which Herbert Read edited, in '41 or '42, which had
extensive passages from 'In Parenthesis'. So, he was both known and
solitary. I suppose the political fault-lines relate to the difficulties of
dealing the age. The poem he read on the radio, from his nursing-home, was
'A,a, a Domine Deus', (orig.1938 rev. extensively 1966) which is almost
Blake-like, except its limit is that it dismisses the contemporary on
purely aesthetic grounds, it is not a moral nor even a religious
indignation.

On 27 March 2013 16:13, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Yeah, & I disagree with his religious views, which still didnt keep me
> from admiring both the poetry & the essays: as a visual artist who wrote he
> had a lot of interest to say. When I finally got to see a few of his
> paintings in Cambridge a few years ago I was blown away...
>
> Doug
> On 2013-03-25, at 11:27 AM, David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
> > The complete poems (very few) of Aubrey Beardsley can be found at:
> >
> > http://www.cypherpress.com/beardsley/poetry/index.asp
> >
> > (as far they go. I remember Jones' essays on art and poetry very well,
> > 'Epoch and artist' was the book title. His views were somewhat, erm.)
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
> http://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations & Continuations 2 (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=962
> Recording Dates
> (Rubicon Press)
>
> Reserved books. Reserved land. Reserved flight.
> And still property is theft.
>
>                                     Phyllis Webb
>
>
>
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>


-- 
David Joseph Bircumshaw
**
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