Poems [Paperback]

Jeremy H. Prynne (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 27, 2006

Poetry from the United Kingdom.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Many readers of so-called innovative or experimental verse regard Prynne as Britain's most important living poet. Until now, most of his work has been available only in small editions and chapbooks. This collection of all Prynne's books, from The Kitchen Poems (1968) to For the Monogram (1997), is therefore a literary event without recent parallel. Prynne, who teaches at Cambridge University, is the center of a group known as the Cambridge poets. His peculiarly local influence is no accident, since he has stayed away from large-scale publishing; he made this decision partly to honor the poems' quiet, hermetic quality, and partly as a response to the absorption of experimental poetics into academic parlance-a parallel, for Prynne, to capitalism's absorption of opposition. Prynne's difficulties demand, and reward, close attention. His early work shows what he learned from Charles Olson, switching from personal to political to geological frames of reference in a single phrase. Enjoyable for their complex logic and concealed wit, these early poems often alternate incompatible metres, creating a distinctive discursive cascade. Next to these recalcitrant works Prynne has placed sequences like "Day Light Songs," more lyrical, less dense and equally accomplished: "And so when it does/ rain & will glide/ down our necks like/ glances into/ the soul, drop/ lets work their/ way forward the sinus/ is truly the scent/ of the earth, upraised." While never a rabble-rousing avant-gardist, Prynne continues to make startling discoveries. Not-You (1993) introduces staggered lines that fall together like tone clusters: "Her pan click/ elb/ second fix/ for them/ pencil/ breather park/ over/ talk at small to." Her Weasels Wild Returning (1994) fuses its dense phrasings to create a consistent persona: "I saw/ her wings in speedy strip like a shadow in the sand/ or in growth like natural reason, her heart so vast..." Prynne's reticence belies his powers-powers many more readers can now hear. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

paper 1-85224-492-5 Poems ($59.95; paper $25.95; Oct. 1; 448 pp.; 1-85224-491-7; paper 1-85224-492-5) is an omnibus gathering from one of Great Britains most highly acclaimed contemporary poets. Still largely unfamiliar to American readers, Prynne has authored more than 20 volumes in England over the past 30 years. This is his first collected edition since 1982, and it includes works from almost every one of his published volumes. A stylist in the high modernist tradition, Prynnes lapidary phraseology and interior rhetoric (there is / no end to the peace claimed by the sick / body and no relief for the mere lack of / fever by which now I lean from the step / and touch at the bare twigs with my wrist) will not be to everyones taste today, but his voice is strong enough to carry into laterand, one hopes, healthierages to find the audience he deserves. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 590 pages
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd; 2 edition (January 27, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1852246561
• ISBN-13: 978-1852246563
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.8 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #708,834 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A major poet, June 21, 2000

By 

N. Dorward "obsessive reviewer" (Toronto, ON Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Do ya like good music?, April 28, 2000

By 

"lexo-2x" - See all my reviews

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.

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

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poems (Paperback)

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.