Lights of Life
JH Prynne, The White Stones
NYRB Poets, 152pp, £8.99, ISBN 9781590179796
reviewed by Jeremy Noel-Tod
The White Stones (1969) is, for me, a daily book. That is not to say that I read it over breakfast. But I think of some words from this great work of philosophical lyricism every day, as I go about my business in a provincial English city sixty miles from the one in which they were written: waking to ‘the sky cloudy / and the day packed into the crystal’; going to work with ‘a set rhythm of / the very slight hopefulness’; noticing ‘a thickening in the words / as the coins themselves wear thin’; enjoying at lunchtime ‘the near prospect / of Campbell’s Cream of Tomato Soup, made I see at / King’s Lynn, Norfolk’ (though it isn’t any more); walking up a hill and feeling ‘the rise bend up gently against me’; worrying about global warming (‘the icecap will / never melt / again why / should it’); hearing of ‘the feast of hatred forcing the civil war / in the U.S.’; feeling that ‘living in hope is so silly when our desires / are so separate’ (‘If we could / level down into the street!’); and thinking, at night, how ‘we slide into comfort and / the trees grow / and grow’, while the poets sit up, listening to the workings of the universe:
(‘Against Hurt’)
James Keery, in a long and illuminating online essay on the ‘ecstatic inspiration’ of The White Stones, Prynne’s third collection of poems, suggests that the title may refer to the Roman custom of judging a day happy or unhappy by dropping a white or a black stone into an urn, thereby accumulating a philosophical heap to be reviewed at the end of each month. Prynne, who taught English in Cambridge from the 1960s, is a famously nocturnal worker, and many of the poems here read like midnight meditations, composed in the moment of reflection like the ‘conversation poems’ of Wordsworth and Coleridge that he holds in such high esteem (‘The night is already quiet and I am / bound in its rise and fall’, ‘Moon Poem’). Not for him ‘the traditional Tennysonian narcotics’ that he diagnosed as the addiction of English poetry in 1963, or the ‘dense suggestive cheesecake … lyric language’ of a more precious and laboured kind of modern poetic music: these are learned poems that ‘go on their nerve’ just as much as the Beats or Frank O’Hara.
At a rare public reading recently, the 80-year-old poet affirmed his commitment to a spontaneous compositional practice, sometimes simply taking poems down ‘from the air,’ at other times preparing to write with a period of intensive reading. The distinction is exemplified by two additional texts from the late Sixties that have been included in this delightfully portable reissue from across the Atlantic. Day Light Songs (1968) shows Prynne at his most bright and airy, exhibiting the influence of the ‘New American Poetry’ of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, as described with expert insight by Peter Gizzi in his introduction (‘the line break and the … clausal phrases [keep] the machine humming and dancing from one idea to the next … you can feel the breath driving the poem’). ‘A Note on Metal’, on the other hand, is a poetically condensed research paper, written in prose, on the historical abstraction of value from substance – a major preoccupation of Prynne’s thought – from megalithic culture to ‘the sheer mercantile distance of coin.’
Despite the author’s reputation for obscurity, everything you need to ‘get’ these poems, as poems, is in them: their rhythms, their images, their wit, their surprises and contradictions, their passionate insistence. For Prynne, as for Olson, ‘the syllable is the king and pin of versification.’ In this verse, ideas are found to be pinned with the little sounds that make a language. To quote the lines that first drew me into Prynne’s work, and eventually led me to spend the first £50 of my PhD stipend on a first edition of The White Stones, an extravagance I never regretted:
(‘The Holy City’)
As Prynne once said of another poet, Wendy Mulford: ‘The lights of life glisten through these poems like butter on bread… Read one every day: it will do you good.’
…I can hear
every smallest growth
the expanse is grinding with it,
out on the flats beyond, down by
the sodium street-lights, in the head.
(‘Against Hurt’)
James Keery, in a long and illuminating online essay on the ‘ecstatic inspiration’ of The White Stones, Prynne’s third collection of poems, suggests that the title may refer to the Roman custom of judging a day happy or unhappy by dropping a white or a black stone into an urn, thereby accumulating a philosophical heap to be reviewed at the end of each month. Prynne, who taught English in Cambridge from the 1960s, is a famously nocturnal worker, and many of the poems here read like midnight meditations, composed in the moment of reflection like the ‘conversation poems’ of Wordsworth and Coleridge that he holds in such high esteem (‘The night is already quiet and I am / bound in its rise and fall’, ‘Moon Poem’). Not for him ‘the traditional Tennysonian narcotics’ that he diagnosed as the addiction of English poetry in 1963, or the ‘dense suggestive cheesecake … lyric language’ of a more precious and laboured kind of modern poetic music: these are learned poems that ‘go on their nerve’ just as much as the Beats or Frank O’Hara.
At a rare public reading recently, the 80-year-old poet affirmed his commitment to a spontaneous compositional practice, sometimes simply taking poems down ‘from the air,’ at other times preparing to write with a period of intensive reading. The distinction is exemplified by two additional texts from the late Sixties that have been included in this delightfully portable reissue from across the Atlantic. Day Light Songs (1968) shows Prynne at his most bright and airy, exhibiting the influence of the ‘New American Poetry’ of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, as described with expert insight by Peter Gizzi in his introduction (‘the line break and the … clausal phrases [keep] the machine humming and dancing from one idea to the next … you can feel the breath driving the poem’). ‘A Note on Metal’, on the other hand, is a poetically condensed research paper, written in prose, on the historical abstraction of value from substance – a major preoccupation of Prynne’s thought – from megalithic culture to ‘the sheer mercantile distance of coin.’
Despite the author’s reputation for obscurity, everything you need to ‘get’ these poems, as poems, is in them: their rhythms, their images, their wit, their surprises and contradictions, their passionate insistence. For Prynne, as for Olson, ‘the syllable is the king and pin of versification.’ In this verse, ideas are found to be pinned with the little sounds that make a language. To quote the lines that first drew me into Prynne’s work, and eventually led me to spend the first £50 of my PhD stipend on a first edition of The White Stones, an extravagance I never regretted:
…love is
when, how &
because we
do : you
could call it Ierusalem, or feel it
as you walk, even quite jauntily, over the grass.
(‘The Holy City’)
As Prynne once said of another poet, Wendy Mulford: ‘The lights of life glisten through these poems like butter on bread… Read one every day: it will do you good.’