Poems: (2015) third edition

Product Information

Prynne’s poetry is powerful and dense. Each book is an experiment, made in a concentrated burst of effort: a mode of writing instigated by the academic calendar, with its rhythm of term and break. The poems investigate the languages of economics and the conditions of inequality; Marx and Mao are important influences. The poems also combine a deep knowledge of science with practical expertise in geology and botany: the devotions of a naturalist are frequently audible. And always there is literature: the history of English poetry, and the collective, global memory of the English language. China Figures," Modern Asian Studies 17 (1983), 671-704; Rpt. rev. as a "Postscript" to New Songs from a Jade Terrace: An Anthology of Early Chinese Love Poetry, trans. Anne Birrell, Penguin Classics, 1986. Jeremy Halvard Prynne, known as J.H. Prynne, was born in Kent, England in 1936. After an education in the English primary and secondary system, followed by a period of two-year service in the British army, Prynne was enrolled as an undergraduate at Jesus College, Cambridge, from 1957 to 1960. He graduated with a first in the second part of the English Tripos, and took up an appointment as Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard during the academic year 1960-1961. He returned to England as a research student at Cambridge University, and in 1962 was appointed to a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College. An honorary professor at the University of Sussex, Prynne has also taught at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, Guangdong, China. A prolific poet, he is the author of the collections Kazoo Dreamboats; or, On What There Is (2011), To Pollen (2006), Biting the Air (2003), Triodes (1999), Her Weasels Wild Returning (1993), Not-You (1993), Poems (1982), The White Stones (1969), Kitchen Poems (1968), Day Light Songs (1968), and Force of Circumstance (1962), among many others. By means of such techniques, Prynne was also able to incorporate parody and archaism, as with “The Plant Time Manifold Transcripts” published in Wound Response (1974). This text is a parodic evocation of the language of scientific research, which is at its conclusion played across an archaic diction, a device which, though no less constructed than the scientific discourse, permits the effects of turning and displacement to work on the mind of the reader. Prints in the New Snow: Notes on ‘Es Lebe der König’, J.H. Prynne’s Elegy to Paul Celan" by Matt Hall. Cordite Poetry Review (2013).

I am not much of a morning person,” Jeremy Prynne warned us, as we made arrangements for this interview. “My natural habitat seems to be the hours of darkness, ad libitum. So I’ll be pretty useless until about ten thirty or eleven a.m. at best: but at the other end of the day I never tire.” Prynne’s humour in person, delivered with a precise accent over half-moon spectacles, can be disarmingly Wodehousian. The poet and critic Veronica Forrest-Thomson once reported that her doctoral super- visor claimed Cambridge University Library had “got his middle name wrong. / He says it stands for Hah / But there is a limit” (in fact, his given names are Jeremy Halvard). In his poetry, however, the wit is sardonic and satirical, expressing a profoundly sceptical worldview in which English slides every- where on a flood of contamination and corruption—political, financial and environmental. “Make a dot / difference, make an offer; these feeling spray-on / skin products are uninhabitable, by field and stream” advises Unanswering Rational Shore (2001), vamping on the staccato verbalism of shopping channels and rolling news. Prynne’s first collection of poems, Force of Circumstance, appeared in 1962. Published by Routledge and Kegan Paul, and omitted from Poems (1982), it was the only publication of Prynne’s work by an established British publishing firm. This collection, influenced though it is by the formal concerns of Donald Davie and the approach to landscape of Charles Tomlinson, constitutes an attempt to move beyond these positions, which at that time represented the most serious attention to poetry easily available in the English poetic milieu. The poems in some instances move beyond meaning toward a foregrounding of the poetic process, so that what is said also implies the position from which the statement is made. Poems such as “Surface Measures” move from a depiction of the concept of the human, as seen in the image of ladders or as “vertical music,” to an evocation of the “latent matrix above / This brilliant music” which is continuous with the sea and “the land where oranges grow.” By the use of paradox, the “latent” matrix that is “above” the brilliant music, apprehended by children in the “ignorance” of their dance, points to a real beyond everyday reality, an above that is also below, to which the poet and the child have comparable access. The poet’s active role in this process can be seen in the high degree of self-consciousness he displays regarding his artifice; his syntactic coherences are strongly marked and his diction foregrounds itself as a play between concretion and abstraction. Thus the poet is established, as the enunciator, in the position of truth, a position reinforced by irony and judgment. “I” is, of course, the vertical letter. The contradictions in this position, between the claim to truth and the displacing effects of the language of that claim, were to provide a tension sustained over much of the later work. Recent scholarship on Prynne by Ryan Dobran and Piers Pennington and a forthcoming volume of his letters to Charles Olson all promise to continue the task of response and interpretation this poet so badly requires. Poems is a vast slab of a thing, but its luminous and unsettling poems richly repay the attention they demand. The curve of Prynne's career has seen a steady intensifying of this kind of challenge to the reader. After the rationalistic meditations of a first volume that he has decided not to reprint, the oeuvre has been marked by strongly motivated deflections of established reading methods. In The White Stones and Kitchen Poems, the fluency and balance of the philosophical monologist are belied by crowding intimations of a whole series of relativising contexts for the occasion of utterance. The English landscape is seen in relation to the withdrawal of the glaciers, its patterns of settlement judged in relation to the customs of nomadic tribes. In Brass, the reader is jolted, more rudely and exhilaratingly, from one unruly format to another, and is forced to cope with constant adjustments of tempo and tone, stretching from invective to elegy, not simply within the volume as a whole, but often within each text. Linearity and narrative, if not dispensed with altogether, become increasingly redundant, and in the adoption of the poetic sequence as the most frequent vehicle for Prynne's concerns, the emphasis on recurrent figures and sound patterns begins to tip the balance in favour of "vertical" rather than "horizontal" priorities in interpretation. This tendency is established in the "diurnal" sequences of the 1970s ( Fire Lizard, A Night Square, Into the Day) and developed and complicated throughout the following two decades.

May 2023

The View Contents List tab below links to a complete listing of the texts included in Poems 2016–2024. Prynne is eighty, and he stands over six feet tall. Each afternoon of our visit, he folded himself into a low easy chair in his upper room and talked candidly and unflaggingly, with genial precision. When amused, he clapped his hands three times in brisk delight; when it occurred to him to show us a book, as it often did, he was up out of his chair to find it before we could stir to help. On the third day of the interview, he gave us a tour of the Gonville and Caius Library, where he served as Librarian of the College from 1969 to 2006.

Prynne’s later tendency, however, to knit words in a mesh of hermetic indirectness has dismayed some poets who might otherwise admire such visionary sentiments. Peter Riley, a close contemporary from the Cambridge poetry scene in the 1960s, writes in his latest book, Pennine Tales: The poem comes from The White Stones (1969), a book as central to postwar British poetry as Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts, Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings or Rosemary Tonks’s Iliad of Broken Sentences. Around the time Prynne wrote it, his fellow Cambridge poet Veronica Forrest-Thomson was developing the theories of “naturalisation” that inspired her critical study Poetic Artifice. To Forrest-Thomson, as a formalist, poems are all about language, whereas “naturalising” readings want to think that poems are really, deep-down, about daffodils or train journeys from Hull to London. In The Making of the Reader, David Trotter proposes a useful distinction between “pathos” and what he terms “anti-pathos”. In any poem the voice of the self and the voice of the text are subtly different. For a Romantic poet their clash results in pathos: the pathos of origins, sincerity and feeling. In modernist poetry, what we frequently get instead is “anti-pathos”, which rejects appeals to origins and insists on dissonance, not harmony, as the defining condition of art. j) Appendix: Additional Publication Details [print run of editions; name and location of the printer, typesetter, binder, designer, distributor, where known] Prynne presents a body of work of staggering audacity and authority such that the map of contemporary poetry already begins to look a little different.'– Roger Caldwell, TLS

Poems 2016–2024

They That Haue Powre to Hurt; A Specimen of a Commentary on Shake-speares Sonnets, 94 (privately printed, 2001). However, since language does not stay in place, word splitting endlessly away from meaning, the poetry of truth, of the real, has always to be repeated. The end is always already a new beginning. In the volumes that followed The White Stones, Prynne engaged upon a rigorous investigation of the possibilities opened up for him by the earlier work. Lézard de feu[ Fire Lizard] (in French). Translated by Dubourg, Bernard. Damazan, Lot-et-Garonne: B. Dubourg. 1975. OCLC 1113486452. But Prynne's poetry also employs a breadth of vocabulary that takes the reader across the OED and down into its historical layers of accrued meanings, not to mention the specialised jargons and lexicons of disciplines as different as microbiology, finance, astronomy, optics, medicine, neurophysiology, genetics and agriculture. It is work informed by a vast amount of reading and its range and pitch are concomitantly daunting. As an advert for Prynne’s work, this would seem to send out all the wrong signals: pellucid, approachable and a world away from our image of Prynne the wilful mystagogue. As Jeremy Noel-Tod has pointed out, the immediate context is a geological controversy on whether the Pleistocene gave way as smoothly as we think to the Holocene, the era taken to mark the beginning of human time. With arch wit, Prynne embroils us in a modernist controversy, but one that played out roughly 12,000 years ago.