Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #647612 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 590 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Conspicuously learned, even hermetic, lyrically dense and, at times, obscurantist, J.H. Prynne's Poemsis a difficult, strangely unnerving book. It not only presents the reader with a rare form of intellectual tourism; it also offers a textbook-clear lesson in the verbal trickiness and playful elegance of High Modernism. Deftly employing a range of reference-- scientific, economic, political and verbal registers, didactic, satirical, sardonic and sentimental--Prynne's collected poems reveal a complex extension of what normally passes for "pure" diction in poetry. Whether or not Prynne is trying to conceive of a poetry going beyond what can, or ought, to be meaningfully said, he treats words as ciphers of transfiguration, as steps on a journey characterised by scrupulous attentiveness. If these poems are neither transparent nor opaque, they are also determinedly elusive, always pointing to something else, beyond the consolations of communication: to peruse these poems in search of the grain of sand inside the pearl is to play by rules they refuse to abide (after all, poems are not onions to be pared away in transparent layers).While easily, and increasingly, seen as a questionable imitator of Ezra Pound, or Charles Olson, Prynne's poetic experiments are already at the limits of lyricism and of what passes for metaphor in contemporary Anglo-American poetry-limits to which we no longer need be enslaved. --David Marriott

Customer Reviews

Perfect
I will have and read these poems all my life. They are responsible for my no longer writing poetry; I could not find a voice that was mine after this, nor could could look on anything I had done with pride. Perfection.

This is POETRY!
Jeremy Prynne is by some distance the greatest living poet writing in English. Difficult and demanding, yes, but infinitely rewarding. Prynne's attention to, and manipulation of the vast range of allusion inherent in words and phrases is just breathakening. His use and transformation of scientific and computer discourse makes him the most modern of modern poets.

The publication of these poems in a form that is generally available (most of these poems were published by small presses in pamplet form) is a major event. If you care at all about contemporary poetry you need to buy this book.

Awe inspiring
There was a device which, by oscillating a mirror forward and back and projecting a succession of images in the right order, created the facsimile of a three dimensional object.

Here, the words shift and oscillate between pun, metaphor, 'found phrase' and allegory, and refer forward and backward in the text until the actual surface of the language appears to be swimming and shifting. The emotional freight emerges apparently unbidden out of the ether.

This work suggests a quite colossal command of the English language and requires some work by the reader to gain a purchase.