'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.

David Jones (1895-1974) was born in Kent. His mother was a Londoner, his father, who worked as a printer's overseer, came from an old Welsh family, and Jones was to say that 'from about the age of six, I felt I belonged to my father's people and their land, though brought up entirely in an English atmosphere'. He attended art school for some years, but in 1915 he was sent with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers to fight in France, where he fought in the battles of the Somme and Ypres. Jones converted to Roman Catholicism in 1921, and in 1922 began a long association with the artist, designer and writer Eric Gill. In Parenthesis, based on Jones's experiences in World War I, was published in 1937, followed in 1952 by another major work, The Anathemata. The Sleeping Lord, fragments from an unfinished larger composition about the crucifixion, appeared in the last year of his life. David Jones's drawings and paintings can be found in the collections of the Tate Museum, the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, and the National Museum of Wales.