What the hole is made of: religion. Astudiaeth o David Jones, CH Sisson, Kathleen Raine, a Peter Abbs, gyda’r ffocws ar rôl chwaraewyd gan crefydd yn eu gwaith. Dim ond Jones ac, i raddau llai, Raine ydw i wedi darllen o’r rhestr yma, ond mae adran fach ar y cyntaf yn werth ei ddarllen.

The obvious comparisons, in the Welsh context, are T. Gwynn Jones’ Arthurian poems, certain of Saunders’ Lewis’ plays and poems, Wyn Griffiths’ verse-drama on Blodeuwedd, and John Cowper Powys’ Welsh historical novels Porius (especially), Owen Glendower, and The Brazen Head. Where Jones excels these is in discarding the realist aesthetic, desperately ragged as that might seem when dealing with myth, and devising a solution which relies on simultaneous presentation of many strata of time. The underlying reality of this would have to be a museum or a library, where a tumble of different eras are juxtaposed. That is to say, Jones foregrounds the unreality of his subject matter by putting the modern (well, 1930s or 1940s) observer in every frame; the characters may be in costume, but the camera also shows us the camera-man, in 20th century garb. We might even describe Jones’ work as hyper-selfconscious, in this respect; an important channel marker, because in Jones the artistic illusion is as deep and overwhelming as it can possibly be, and we might want to remember that selfconsciousness does not have to mean loss of faith in your artistic powers and purpose. We could say that the other writers mentioned base the literary work on the idea of forgetting: we discard at the threshold, as if a pair of shoes, the knowledge that the work, written in 20th century Welsh or English, is not really ancient, and we are caught in the 5th century, or whenever, as if in a prison. In Jones’ work there is no forgetting; it is poetry about the contemplation of the past, not some costume drama where the actors are wearing genuine replica Dark Ages underwear.