Poems
J.H. Prynne
publisher: Dufour Editions, 1999
isbn: 1-85224-492-5
price: $25.95
The publication of Poems, Prynne's collected books from "Kitchen Poems" (1968) to "For the Monogram" (1997) is a literary event that will probably be unparalleled for some time.
Prynne decided early on that his books -- each of which would usually contain one twenty or so page sequence -- would only be published in small editions, partly as a modest shunning of inordinate attention and partly to honor their quiet, hermetic quality and the care one must take to read them. His poems rarely, if ever, had distribution in the States, or even far outside of Cambridge, where he has been an influential presence for decades.
Nonetheless, he has acquired a reputation, deservedly, as one of the major English poets of his time, a position drenched with ethical significance as he's never caved in to the calls of celebrity or other forms of "selling out" -- his verse, if anything, has gotten less commodifiable, more dense and difficult, over the years.
Prynne's early work departed mostly, so history says, from his reading of Olson and an interest in science, but have a heightened rhetoric that never strays into the indulgently eccentric manner of the American, and contain a political earnestness and subtle rationality (not to mention wit) that keeps them tethered to the matter at hand:
And don't let some
wise and quick-faced historical rat tell us about
the industrial north and its misery, since every
songbird since then (& with no honorable
exception for D.H. Lawrence) has carolled about
that beautiful black colour as if
this were the great rot in the heart.
[15]
The work in "Kitchen Poems" introduced what has since become a staple formal feature of Prynne's work (and of those he has influenced), which is the use of contrasting meters -- often an iambic based line versus a two-beat, syncopated balladic line -- within a single poem, the latter set off by indents and occurring in sets, giving the appearance of a cascading effect to the poem.
But he also engages in a much freer line in other early work such as "Day Light Songs", a poem that is steeped in praise for life and nature not unlike another English poet which whom Prynne shares qualities and contradictions, Gerard Manley Hopkins:
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
[27]
There is no way to reduce the over 400 pages of work presented here to simple phrases; the long view shows that the pattern of production seems to be from dense, large canvas exercises interspersed with lighter, lyrical sequences -- overtly "political works" contrasted with spare "private" ones -- but that says little.
Many of the poems just strike one as major and demanding close, even scholarly, attention, such as "The Bee Target on his Shoulder" (1971), which moves through several registers in its 3-pages, a sort of Proustian ramble of recollection, but with mythological resonances, as if it were a paean to the lost anthropomorphism of the gods:
Be gentle with his streamy locks until he gets the wrapper off.
Strip pieces of flesh from the animals lying dead in the streets.
Love him, in le silence des nuits, l'horreur des cimetieres;
otherwise the trendy book will slide
into the bath and linger there,
avec le savon
and the Rose of Texas, toasted marine-style.
[152]
Later sequences like "Not-You" (1993) seem to offer no basal metrical figure to use for guidance -- the forms range from three-line stanzas to staggered, "fragmentary" lines that work like tone clusters whose aural figure isn't discernible until the sounding of the final lines:
Her pan click
elb
second fix
for them
pencil
breather park
over
talk at small to.
[392]
Another later sequence, "Her Wild Weasels Returning," (1994) is made of dense 24-line poems in which traces of a meditating persona are obliquely present, lingering to maintain a supporting narrative structure. It is as metrically consistent as "Not-You" appears not to be:
Who with he'll say climbing, to let blood slit imposed
at a turret elevation to buffer high return. I saw
her wings in speedy strip like a shadow in the sand
or in growth like natural reason, her heart so vast
as justly to make cause with the fiery fountain sealed
on track right across terra nullius overhead. I knew
that, she made me see the light level cracking along
her trebled skyline: I held my view.
[416]
Prynne can seem to be one of the most "avant-garde" of later-century English poets -- his word-play borders on the recursivity of Stein or the over-determinacy underlying the mosaic surfaces of Finnegans Wake -- and he seems to have resolved certain problems involving lyrical subjectivity that were glossed over by the Language poets.
However, he is also the most convincingly traditional, in that his formal grace, his skill with "numbers" -- he is as metrically competent and deliberate as his Cambridge precursor, Thomas Gray -- is closer to a stoic, classical sensibility for these democratic times than the sickly, and sometimes studied, ironies of those in the line of the "Movement" poets.
|
