T. H. Jones: Poet of Exile

P. Bernard Jones and Don Dale-Jones

‘ . . . certainly sends the reader rushing to search for copies of T.H. Jones’ work.’ Epynt Flyer

‘ . . . a fascinating and deserved account of a man whose inner demons and loving but ambiguous attitude to Wales make him a quintessential Anglo-Welsh poet of his time.’ www.gwales.com

‘ . . . P. Bernard Jones and Don Dale-Jones have probably written the standard work on T. H. Jones. It is scholarly, interesting, highly readable and recommended to lovers of biographies of the later twentieth-century poets.’ (Poetry Quarterly Review)

T. H. Jones (1921–1965) achieved little recognition in Wales or Britain during his lifetime. After publishing his first volume of poetry in 1957, he emigrated to Australia, where his career as a poet and lecturer came to a sadly premature end when he was accidentally drowned.

T. H. Jones: Poet of Exile is the first literary biography of an undervalued writer who, the authors suggest, should be thought of as one of the defining poets of mid- twentieth century Welsh culture, alongside Dylan and R. S. Thomas. This perceptive study locates Jones in his social and cultural contexts and demonstrates his considerable achievement as a transitional figure in the development of ‘Anglo-Welsh’ poetry.

The authors draw extensively on unpublished sources, such as Jones’ extraordinary hand-written Black Book which contains nearly all his poems in chronological order, and on interviews with those closest to Jones. It is a valuable record of a writer important both because of the poetry he wrote and because of what his life has so powerfully to reveal to us about his culture, his period and his place.

P. Bernard Jones is a family friend and teacher, whose Ph.D. was on the life and work of T. H. Jones. Don Dale-Jones is a free-lance teacher and writer and former senior lecturer at Trinity College Carmarthen. He has published widely on Welsh writing in English and is the co-editor of T. H. Jones’ Collected Poems.