Review by David Mahan

Elizabeth R. Powell is La Retraite Fellow in Theology and Spirituality at Durham University, UK.

Some of the most reassuring evidence of a renewal of Christian learning in literary studies is the publication of high-quality scholarship working at the intersection of literature and religion. This new book by Elizabeth Powell confirms this trend. As a theologian, and as her title indicates, Dr. Powell approaches Jones’ work with attention focused on the tasks and shaping of theology―as she puts it, “doing theology through a close, attentive engagement with the art of David Jones” (6). Because the interchange between literature and theology also constitutes a central facet in the shaping of a Christian poetics, I commend Powell’s book as a model for advancing this undertaking as well.

As Powell carefully elucidates, Jones himself worked at this intersection, famously depicting human beings as ‘sign-makers’ whose investment in ars implicates them in sacred activity. Powell doesn’t attempt to defend Jones’ claim so much as to demonstrate how it informed his art and found expression in the verbal and visual work he produced in a “quest for Sacrament,” as Powell applies it to Jones’ poetry in particular.

For the purposes of this demonstration, Powell has selected three of Jones’ artefacts: the poem “A, a, a, DOMINE DEUS,” the painted inscription of a portion of the preface to the Christmas Mass, and his wood engraving Bride. Together these instantiate for Powell her central claim that artists as well as those who study their work find “renewing and generative” forms of not only artistic but theological practice (10). The ‘reading’ of all three of these works, she insists, aims “to practice the mode of loving attention elicited by their nature as sacramental signs” (9).

In her conclusion she takes up this same motif of attentiveness, asserting that what we learn from Jones’ art as well as her own engagement with it promises to reinvigorate both theological reflection and religious devotional practices. Taking her cue from Simone Weil’s notion of prayer as attention to God, she affirms that “each of these three artefacts directs us also in the way such attention itself may be shaped in relation to the divine and holy in things” (132). In this respect, as one way of doing theology, art achieves what other, more discursive forms of theological expression are less able to: contact with the divine facilitated by the craft and beauty of the work itself. As she writes in her introduction when evoking the very Jonesian notion of the sacramental, “Jones’s works – in both word and image – invite us to this kind of creative participation, an activity that by grace may also be a sanctifying or holy-making process” (10).

Although poetry is only one of three artefacts under inspection in this book, Powell’s careful attention to form and formal devices offers a superb example of the kind of close reading that any substantive poetics requires. Regarding her treatment of “A, a, a, DOMINE DEUS” in particular, she rightly focuses on the work that the poem does by such devices, as a means of ‘performing’ its central question regarding the relationship between the sacred and the profane, “the despised and the devoted” (23).

From her illuminating elaboration of the poem’s title (26ff) through her extensive consideration of its details as she charts the poem’s progression, Powell shows her deftness as a reader―never overwhelming what we find on the page with her own interests in ‘theological craft,’ but demonstrating the latter convincingly as we find it emerging from the work. When she does provide a larger context for the poem from Jones’s own thought as well as that of other writers (Coleridge, Tolkien) and theologians, she earns those connections, as when she then turns to the distinctively Christian concerns which the poem explores.

Elizabeth Powell’s skill as a reader and thinker serves well her aim not only to refresh theological methods but to expand the scope of theological resources for Christian reflection and practices. Her remarkable study of David Jones also serves the ‘craft’ of literary scholarship, and in this way offers a model of Christian reading well worth inspecting by those interested to shape a Christian poetics for our own age.

David Mahan

Lecturer in Religion and Literature, Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Yale Divinity School
Co-Director, Rivendell Center for Theology and the Arts
david.mahan@yale.edu