Kitchen Poems

by J.H. Prynne

Paperback. Spine and corners are a little worn; one or two insignificant marks on BEP. Text is clear on sound, clean pages. TS

Genres: Poetry

32 pages, Paperback

First published September 5, 1968

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

[Rob Hendricks]

"This is the shining grudge of numbers, / The name we will not lose to any possible stranger: / the star & silk of my eye, that will not return."

[Differengenera]

2. So then, we should not trust the hope
that is merely a name for silk, for
purity untouched by any Italian hand.
The celestial routine is begging, & a nasty
toy at that; the stars are names and the
names are necessarily false. We choose
to believe in the flotsam, the light glance
passing & innocent because unpriced.

3. Which is grossly untrue, because we
pay for it well enough, I have squandered
so much lie & good nature I could hardly
guess the account.
The numbers are out
there in the human
sky, the pure margin
which are the trust we
deserve.
And we should
have what the city does need,
the sky, if we did not so
want the need.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

essentially JHP's debut pamph back in 1968 and what a piece so boldly struck and this early it's a real voice entering the room. Very political as Prynne habitually is, though I think is often underrecognised as a political poet. Constructions are fabulous but miles and miles away from the sort of thing he writes in the 2000s and 2010s that certain pearl-clutchers like to shake their heads and tut about.
nice