Dai Greatcoat: A Self-Portrait of David Jones in his Letters

‘The mind of David Jones is capable of such breathtaking leaps across the centuries, that nothing can appear incongruous in his writings and they all help to shed light on him as an artist and as a poet.’ Apollo

Through a selection of letters to friends and literary peers, Dai Greatcoat presents a rare insight into the life and work of David Jones, and in so doing offers an autobiographical portrait of the author in his own words. Dai Greatcoat is the Welsh soldier of In Parenthesis, Jones’s acclaimed narrative of the Great War, but the sturdy yet all too vulnerable figure, wrapped close in his ‘misfit outsize greatcoat’, is an apt symbol for the great poet and artist who died in 1974. In this volume covering the last fifty years of his life, Jones’s correspondence has been edited and arranged with a linking commentary to form a remarkable biographical portrait. The letters – merry, irreverent, sometimes sombre and anxious, always amazingly open – are unfailingly entertaining and will reveal to his many admirers, as well as to those encountering his work for the first time, a figure no one could possibly forget.