Jonathan Wilson died during the Second World War, in Holland 1944. His work seems well-received here, but I can find little else about him. Friend-Pereira is lukewarm about Reed's collection, but has a few nice things to say about the Tintagel sequence. Worth adding to the "blurbs" page for shorter reviews of Reed's work.
A Map of Verona is more pretentious: Mr. Reed, when he wrote his poems 'used to like ambiguity'. There is some of the expected depth and subtlety in several of the pieces; but much of the writing appears needlessly prosaic and splay-footed. Mr. Reed has submitted to various up-to-the-minute influences: Eliot, Auden, Macneice, Day Lewis: and it comes as a surprise to see that in one poem he echoes someone so poetically different from these as William Morris! Felicitous phrases like 'a shining smile of snowfall, late in Spring', are mixed, up with fashionable (so-called Eliot-esque) lack of interest: 'The place not worth describing, but like every empty place'. The best poems are the four included under the general title of 'Tintagel'. Here Mr. Reed shows a keen eye, a ready pen, and a pleasing sense of the dramatic: the Arthurian theme does not, in his hands, seem vieux jeu.
