Acrylic Tips

by J.H. Prynne

16 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2002

About the author

J. H. Prynne was born in Kent in 1936 and studied at Cambridge University; he worked there as a teacher and scholar in the Department of English and is currently a life fellow of Gonville and Caius College. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Sussex, and a Visiting Professor at Sun Yat-Sen University, People’s Republic of China. He has published forty-one collections of poems during the period 1968–2015, all now reprinted in the third enlarged edition of his Poems (Bloodaxe Books, Hexham, 2015).

This volume, The White Stones, was composed in the earlier 1960s, at the same time as working with students in the study of English and European poetry of various classical traditions, and also assimilating the force of the New American Poetry of that period. A good reading knowledge of French and German and Italian kept open a complex historical perspective, and an extremely partial understanding of Chinese demonstrated the influence of Ezra Pound in a new cross-light.

Since these early times there have also been extended commentary-essays, on the Han Chinese lyric, on a painting by Willem de Kooning, on literary/linguistic topics, and three extended commentary-monographs: on a Shakespeare sonnet, on a poem by Wordsworth and another by George Herbert, on Wallace Stevens, and on a scroll-painting by the Chinese landscape painter Shen Zhou (1425–1509). The author has traveled quite widely, in the U.S.A. and further afield; his poems have been translated into French, German, Italian, Norwegian and Chinese, and a brief selection is being prepared in Mexican Spanish; there have also been a number of musical settings and workings. His collected prose writings (2 vols) are currently in preparation. Some website material is available, including a full online bibliography and various talks and lectures.

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prynne’s turn-of-the-millennium poem from a tour of Australia in the company of fellow poet John Kinsella and his eccentric sheep-shearing brother. Much commentary, IMO somewhat dubious, has been written about this poem, but what hasn’t been commented on to my knowledge is the whole road-trip framing for it, which in combination with the poem’s epigraph makes for the mordant humor I have come to know and love from this poet.

Assuming banishment for lost time back across nullity
in speck-through marking worthless eyelash, strict
blast of sand eggplant prone, tampered dune how fast
the grievance solitary; krook pathways risen up
to wheel and turn about spandrels high over submission
flexed to burnish and chomp get hungry for intimate
newsy entrances. Get plenty get quick. Out on the level
camber trim mouthing actions, louder into the swing

Denounced for parity and affront, many will know what
to do at the tip, the crush horizon. […]

This is late Prynne (but not yet late-late Prynne or, because of his long career, the already late-late-late Prynne that followed), so there is the usual syntactic disjointedness and the violence. Yet as far as every volume by Prynne is a new project in itself, Acrylic Tips is a more engaging and memorable work than the poems published on either side of it. It’s curious to learn so much about Australian sheep-farming from a Cambridge don. There’s plenty of imagery that I have pleasurably ruminated on, even if many things here are less possible to establish a secure reading for than the bolshie political concerns that line so many of his other late poems.

Burning child says shall we gather micron glass to
dress admonishment at the river-bed, observing
mass stricken touch your lips sewn to silence at air
the stream by day care who does. Immobile tough

Stance glowing as star circlet icy to see wired up hostile
and revered discard the wearing frame, drop threads
down cheek by water deck. By year end will send bitten
for carbon season indifferent new chasm revival tips
Sprung forth digressed, cicatrised. […]