14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A major poet, June 21, 2000
This review is from: Poems (Paperback)
It's hard to know how to review this book: Prynne has been for several decades now the most important "unknown" poet in the English language, his work earning a reputation for its sybilline authority & beauty. A nutshell description would be: imagine a collision between Charles Olson, William Wordsworth & Paul Celan--& if you don't have quite Prynne's work, you'd have a rough idea of its excitement & its extraordinary summing-up of an entire poetic tradition. Whatever you think of the poetry (& if you're not sometimes frustrated or bewildered by it, you're probably an unusual sort), it cannot be ignored: Prynne is a major figure in the last century of poetry.
Prynne's career has been an unusual one. His first book, _Force of Circumstance_ (1962), was written in mostly conventional verse-forms (rhymed quatrains, blank verse, etc.) & was informed by the work of Donald Davie & Charles Tomlinson. (Prynne has suppressed this early book in the volume under review.) Then there's a gap--the next three books, _Kitchen Poems_ (1968), _Aristeas_ (1968) and _The White Stones_ (1969), are the first example of the "mature" Prynne. Unlike _Force of Circumstance_ (published by the trade publisher Routledge & Kegan Paul), these three books came from two "underground" presses (Ferry & Grosseteste) & one underground press recently gobbled up by Jonathan Cape (Cape Goliard). The writing shows that there's been a complete switch of allegiance to the poetry of Ed Dorn & Charles Olson; it is dense, impassioned, politically-aware & informed by recondite investigations into archaeology & anthropology. The urgency of this work is still stirring: many of the poems appeared as "news items" in the ultra-obscure worksheet _The English Intelligencer_, & their sense of participation in a community of poetic discovery & inquiry can still be heard.
What next? Well, that's a good question: the work after this, beginning with _Brass_ (1971), is an a startlingly different style: if you're familiar with the work of Celan, this might give some idea of the mysterious quality of the later Prynne. But it's not hermetic work: its bewildering array of linguistic registers offers startled recognition at every turn--from quotations from the poetic tradition (one poem in _The Oval Window_ [1983], for instance, weaves back and forth through a passage from Shakespeare's _All's Well That Ends Well_), to the jargon of science, politics, computers & economics, to demotic utterance. Most of these books came out in the most fugitive editions--_Bands Around the Throat_ (1986) for instance is a stapled chapbook of poems spat out of the author's wordprocessor, while _Word Order_ (1989) is a gorgeous rust-coloured book printed on an old-fashioned printing press. The author, meanwhile, scrupulously abjured from "explaining" his work (unlike in his old _Intelligencer_ days: Prynne has since the 1960s published very little prose--just a few lectures, letters & afterwords). He's also scrupulously avoided the engines of poetic publicity--for instance, preventing his work from appearing in most anthologies of contemporary poetry. (There are a few exceptions: check out _A Various Art_, a collection of work from the Ferry/Grosseteste poets; or _Poems for the Millennium_, vol. 2, an anthology of world modernist poetry.) The appearance of this volume from a "mainstream" publisher is unexpected, and welcome. I'll end by quoting one poem from _The Oval Window_ (1983), which might give some idea of what Prynne's like: [I'll have to double-space it to avoid its getting formatted like prose!]
Standing by the window I heard it,
while waiting for the turn. In hot light
and chill air it was the crossing flow
of even life, hurt in the mouth but
exhausted with passion and joy. Free
to leave at either side, at the fold line
found in threats like herbage, the watch
is fearful and promised before. The years
jostle and burn up as a trust plasma.
Beyond help it is joy at death itself:
a toy hard to bear, laughing all night.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Do ya like good music?, April 28, 2000
This review is from: Poems (Paperback)
I personally think that being a lyric poet is just about the strangest, most redundant thing to be in this day and age. The poetry sections of our bookshops are crammed with volume after slim volume (Slim Volume: Cowboy Poet) consisting of little but short-winded, doggedly high-minded whinging about utterly trivial events in the poets' lives. If, like me, you are terminally bored by people setting down this or that evanescent perception
in a series
of barely rhythmical
syllabic groups
that would seem intolerably boring
if the poets'd bothered
to write them out
as prose sentences,
then you're probably the kind of person who'd appreciate J.H. Prynne.
Prynne is the most illustrious of a fairly small number of English-language poets (others include Barry MacSweeney and Iain Sinclair) who still cleave to a sort-of modernist idea that poems ought not to say things that can be said any other way, but instead are verbal artifacts unto themselves, with all the hazards of connotation that that implies. His early work is in a shabby, low-rent Four-Quartetsy sort of mode, but during the late Seventies he really hit his stride. His best works are glossy, sexy, sardonic, thoroughly worked-over verbal machines that do what few other poets have dared to do since the death of Pound. Prynne is not _primarily_ interested in communicating some amazingly primal and/or psycho-sexual-cultural-political-transcendental experience, he's interested in the glint and spark of words put together in a certain way, and this saves him from being either kitschy (as the worst work of Ted Hughes can be) or trivial (as, well, pretty much most poets usually are.) His work is a wonderful corrective to the linguistic slackness and sentimentality of so much modern poetry. Give him a go. This is definitely a desert island book, if only for the sheer amount of allusion and density Prynne is able to pack into a short poem - even at his most recondite, he's pushing you towards the world you've vainly tried to leave behind.
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A highly recommended read for all dedicated poetry lovers as well as students of philosophy, May 2, 2006
Poems is an inspired and inspirational collection of Britain's leading late Modernist poet J.H. Prynne. Prynne's highly acclaimed collection of poems, now expanded upon in this second edition of Poems, will alter the perceiving nature of the reader as the words manipulate the language to induce questioning on the minds of every reader. Poems is a highly recommended read for all dedicated poetry lovers as well as students of philosophy. Swallow Your Pride: At work on the potash table/reckoning up for a new song/put one, put one, from between the fingers/or at the checkout you are lost to view;/just a little better/making a fresh start/in promise to see all these signs/sit stable and by heart: so long/further to got, about to part.
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