Customer Reviews (4)

A highly recommended read for all dedicated poetry lovers as well as students of philosophy
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.

blow to the head
Shocking that only two reviews up for this. I suppose as most of the work from `Brass`(1971) onwards is gunning for bogus aesthetes, it is hardly pleasant to find it`s you, you media-produced swathe of complacent compliance. This kind of distance sets the chances of you aiming to interface with your own complicities - in what would no doubt have been a rather hit and miss affair - at next to zero. If you agree that looking gift horses in the mouth is hardly sensible, look this bunch of negativities in the teeth and see why you fail to agree to fail, want to understand what understanding might make untrue, or start wondering how contaminated your egotistical sublimation may actually have become, and ask what translates as the best thing to do about it. Bonne chance!

A major poet
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 betweenCharles Olson, William Wordsworth & Paul Celan--& if you don't havequite Prynne's work, you'd have a rough idea of its excitement & itsextraordinary summing-up of an entire poetic tradition.Whatever you thinkof the poetry (& if you're not sometimes frustrated or bewildered byit, you're probably an unusual sort), it cannot be ignored: Prynne is amajor figure in the last century of poetry.

Prynne's career has been anunusual one.His first book, _Force of Circumstance_ (1962), was writtenin 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.)Thenthere'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 bythe trade publisher Routledge & Kegan Paul), these three books camefrom 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 thepoetry of Ed Dorn & Charles Olson; it is dense, impassioned,politically-aware & informed by recondite investigations intoarchaeology & anthropology.The urgency of this work is stillstirring: many of the poems appeared as "news items" in theultra-obscure worksheet _The English Intelligencer_, & their sense ofparticipation in a community of poetic discovery & inquiry can still beheard.

What next?Well, that's a good question: the work after this,beginning with _Brass_ (1971), is an a startlingly different style: ifyou're familiar with the work of Celan, this might give some idea of themysterious quality of the later Prynne.But it's not hermetic work: itsbewildering array of linguistic registers offers startled recognition atevery turn--from quotations from the poetic tradition (one poem in _TheOval Window_ [1983], for instance, weaves back and forth through a passagefrom Shakespeare's _All's Well That Ends Well_), to the jargon of science,politics, computers & economics, to demotic utterance.Most of thesebooks 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'swordprocessor, while _Word Order_ (1989) is a gorgeous rust-coloured bookprinted on an old-fashioned printing press.The author, meanwhile,scrupulously abjured from "explaining" his work (unlike in hisold _Intelligencer_ days: Prynne has since the 1960s published very littleprose--just a few lectures, letters & afterwords).He's alsoscrupulously avoided the engines of poetic publicity--for instance,preventing his work from appearing in most anthologies of contemporarypoetry.(There are a few exceptions: check out _A Various Art_, acollection of work from the Ferry/Grosseteste poets; or _Poems for theMillennium_, vol. 2, an anthology of world modernist poetry.)Theappearance of this volume from a "mainstream" publisher isunexpected, and welcome.I'll end by quoting one poem from _The OvalWindow_ (1983), which might give some idea of what Prynne's like: [I'llhave to double-space it to avoid its getting formatted likeprose!]

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, hurtin the mouth but

exhausted with passion and joy.Free

to leave ateither side, at the fold line

found in threats like herbage, thewatch

is fearful and promised before.The years

jostle and burn up asa trust plasma.

Beyond help it is joy at death itself:

a toy hard tobear, laughing all night.

Do ya like good music?
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: CowboyPoet) consisting of little but short-winded, doggedly high-minded whingingabout utterly trivial events in the poets' lives.If, like me, you areterminally bored by people setting down this or that evanescent perception

in a series

of barely rhythmical

syllabic groups

that would seemintolerably boring

if the poets'd bothered

to write them out

as prosesentences,

then you're probably the kind of person who'd appreciate J.H.Prynne.

Prynne is the most illustrious of a fairly small number ofEnglish-language poets (others include Barry MacSweeney and Iain Sinclair)who still cleave to a sort-of modernist idea that poems ought not to saythings that can be said any other way, but instead are verbal artifactsunto themselves, with all the hazards of connotation that that implies. His early work is in a shabby, low-rent Four-Quartetsy sort of mode, butduring the late Seventies he really hit his stride.His best works areglossy, sexy, sardonic, thoroughly worked-over verbal machines that do whatfew other poets have dared to do since the death of Pound.Prynne is not_primarily_ interested in communicating some amazingly primal and/orpsycho-sexual-cultural-political-transcendental experience, he's interestedin the glint and spark of words put together in a certain way, and thissaves him from being either kitschy (as the worst work of Ted Hughes canbe) or trivial (as, well, pretty much most poets usually are.)His work isa wonderful corrective to the linguistic slackness and sentimentality of somuch modern poetry.Give him a go.This is definitely a desert islandbook, if only for the sheer amount of allusion and density Prynne is ableto pack into a short poem - even at his most recondite, he's pushing youtowards the world you've vainly tried to leave behind. ... Read more

Product Description
This is the first book-length study of the work of J. H. Prynne, who has been described by Peter Ackroyd as 'without doubt the most formidable and accomplished poet in England today, a writer who has single-handedly changed the vocabulary of expression'. The book sets out to introduce Prynne's poetry to a larger audience than it has hitherto received and the authors examine the work in relation to traditions of Romanticism and Modernism, recent theory, debates about Modernism and Postmodernism, political questions of discourse and power, and the implications of lyrical uses of scientific and technical material. The impetus for these discussions is provided by detailed, exploratory readings of individual poems and sequences from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s. "Nearly Too Much" succeeds in the difficult task of providing both a knowledgeable and sophisticated analysis of Prynne's poetry for those to whom it is familiar and a helpful introduction for the benefit of a larger public to whom the work is new. ... Read more

Product Description
Not available in the Freemantle/ Bloodaxe Poems, thissequence repeats in a raised flash the monstrous singularity ofPrynne's commitment, to a new poetic ratio so propitiative and soretarding and already so famously beautiful. Alert even to the slendermargin of abated cynic watchfulness in Her Weasels Wild Returning andFor The Monogram, historic and exorbitantly new, Red D Gypsum strikesdown a song for us as no-one else has ever quite been able. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

plaster of readiness
All the old emblems upshot in your outline, assumptions burn the interim perimeter, "ready to mount the display hinting at fitful repartee". It would only be nice to ignore the odd temperer. ... Read more

Product Description
Poetry. To a small but vocal group of poetry devotees, J.H. Prynne has long been considered the towering British poet of the late 20th century. Born in Kent, Prynne studied at Cambridge, where he currently works. He has published twenty collections of poems during the period 1968-97, prior to the four collections assembled and reprinted in FURTHERANCE. His works have been translated into many languages, including French, German, and Chinese. This collection follows Poems which collected all of Prynne's previous poems. FURTHERANCE collects "Red D Gypsum," "Pearls That Were," "Triodes," and "Unanswering Rational Shore." ... Read more

Product Description
Volume 2 of the journal Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary. On the Poems of J.H. Prynne. Edited by Ryan Dobran.Contents:RYAN DOBRAN, Introduction JOSH STANLEY, Back On Into The Way Home: "Charm Against Too Many Apples" [The White Stones, 1969];THOMAS ROEBUCK & MATTHEW SPERLING, "The Glacial Question, Unsolved": A Specimen Commentary on Lines 1-31 [The White Stones, 1969]ROBIN PURVES, A Commentary on J.H. Prynne's"Thoughts on the Esterházy Court Uniform" [The White Stones, 1969]REITHA PATTISON,J.H. Prynne's "The Corn Burned by Syrius" [The White Stones, 1969]KESTON SUTHERLAND, Hilarious absolute daybreak [Brass, 1971]MICHAEL STONE-RICHARDS, The time of the subject in the neurological field (I): A Commentary on J.H. Prynne's "Again in the Black Cloud" [Wound Response, 1974]JUSTIN KATKO, Relativistic Phytosophy: Towards a Commentary on "The Plant Time Manifold Transcripts" [Wound Response, 1974]JOHN WILKINSON, Heigh Ho: A Partial Gloss of Word Order [Word Order, 1989]Glossator publishes original commentaries, editions and translations of commentaries, and essays and articles relating to the theory and history of commentary, glossing, and marginalia. The journal aims to encourage the practice of commentary as a creative form of intellectual work and to provide a forum for dialogue and reflection on the past, present, and future of this ancient genre of writing. By aligning itself, not with any particular discipline, but with a particular mode of production, Glossator gives expression to the fact that praxis founds theory. GLOSSATOR.ORG ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of J(eremy) H(alvard) Prynne, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 1631 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Product Description
Volume 3 of the journal Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary. http://glossator.org ... Read more