Luke Roberts Reviews Recent Work by Jeremy Prynne

Now up at the Chicago Review is Luke Roberts's review of J.H. Prynne's more recent poetry, including Kazoo Dreamboats (2011); Al-Dente (2014); Each to Each (2017); Of the Abyss (2017); Or Scissel (2018); and Of Better Scrap (2019). "Added to these have been the useful reissues of the 1969 volume The White Stones, an annotated edition of the 1983 work The Oval Window, plus a long interview with the poet by Jeff Dolven and Joshua Kotin, published in The Paris Review. I don’t exempt myself from this enthusiasm," writes Roberts. More:

To quote an early line, the night is young / and limitless our greed—to which we might add, these things take time to digest.[3] And yet it seems to me that the critical reception of Prynne’s poetry has stalled. How should we account for this? 

The disturbance that Kazoo Dreamboats presents to the schedule of Prynne’s writing can’t be underestimated. If The White Stones and The Oval Windowhave been tacitly positioned as boundary-markers in the development of his style and method, Kazoo Dreamboats must surely also be nominated as a crucial twist-point in his work of the last two decades. Written during a period of political revolt—the student movement and London riots in the UK, the Occupy movement in the United States, and the Arab Spring—the poem is a visionary work of passion and fervor. For close to thirty pages of long-lined verse, edging towards prose, Prynne details a kind of ecstatic righteousness. Here is a sample from the first page:

                                                                  Always desired by zero option
wide-eyed node employ cloud droplets en masse phantasmal, near in
to scar friable distinct cash-back nexus, on the plate. What’s to
be got contagious dendrite hit conductance ran fast even flash-like,
punished in stupid glory by ever the same to say.

One common critical approach to Prynne’s work, established in the 1990s, has been to identify the various discourses and registers that the language either draws on or refers us to. So in this passage we have the realm of human agency (desire); the structure of power, both juridical and moral (punishment); the ever-present cash-nexus; the human body and cellular biology (the scar and the dendrite); topped off with a détournement of Lenin (“what’s to / be got”). There’s also nature (“cloud droplets”), the economy and game theory (“employ” and “zero option”), and there’s a kind of energetic sweep tying it all together: the contagion, the fast running, and again the threat of punishment. This entanglement is also musical...

Read the full review at the Chicago Review.