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The White Stones
J. H. Prynne is Britain’s leading late-modernist poet. His work, as it has emerged since the 1960s, when he was close to Charles Olson and Edward Dorn, is marked by a remarkable combination of lyricism and abstraction, at once austere and playful. The White Stones is a book that is central to Prynne’s career and poetics, and it constitutes an ideal introduction to the achievement and vision of a legendary but in America still little-known contemporary master.
- GenresPoetryBritish Literature
Hardcover
First published March 29, 2016
About the author
J.H. Prynne
66 books26 followersJ. 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
October 18, 2021
Discovering the formidably modernist English poet J.H. Prynne through his collected Poems volume was a very pleasant shock, but although The White Stones (1968) stands as the first collection he recognizes in his list of works (earlier juvenalia having been suppressed), I personally don’t think he had hid his stride yet. Before I dive into the context of this volume and my opinion on the poems, let me just quote from the very first piece here, “Airport Poem: Ethics of Survival” as a somewhat representative sample of the language and imagery readers will get here:
It’s knotty stuff that does contain strong emotion but handles it obliquely, and the references are often extremely hermetic. Some of the references can be unlocked by a particularly erudite reader but, for example, “In Cimmerian Darkness” was never deciphered until a researcher noticed, totally by coincidence, a particular painting hanging in a room at Cambridge University that must have inspired Prynne.
Prynne’s reevaluation of his entire technique in the early 1960s, which produced these poems, came through a growing affinity with American modernist poets, as they offered an alternative to a British scene Prynne saw as staid and boring. Chief among these Americans was Charles Olson, with whom Prynne maintained a correspondence for some time. (In fact, that correspondence has been published and I recommend reading it, as some of The White Stones poems appeared first in Prynne’s letters and the context elucidates them.)
Just as Olson was at work on the huge Maximus project that draws in the history, geography, trade, economics of Massachusetts, Prynne’s poems in this volume range from Britain’s prehistory to present-day movements of capital. The “white stones” of the title are several, the moon and hail among them, but often the term alludes to glaciers. “The Glacial Question, Unresolved” and “On the Matter of Thermal Packing” depict modern Britain as literally shaped by the melting of the icy and weather patterns that persist to this day.
Economic references abound, too. One might assume that any 1960s Englishman talking this much about capital must have been a Bolshie and probably boring at parties, but if Prynne has radical politics (as opposed to mere detached interest) the reader can’t really tell. In any event, this look at economics isn’t all dour and serious, for it inspired one of the laugh-out-loud poems in this volume, “Foot and Mouth”, where Campbell’s Soup serves as a sign of nascent globalization.
Now Prynne’s next collection, Brass shows a much tighter prosody and flow of images which is highly conducive to memorization, so that the poems stay in the mind long enough for one to half-consciously ruminate on them until their meanings are cracked. The White Stones feels relatively weak because firstly, its poems aren’t as memorable. Most tend to be offputtingly long and chatty (many of the poems read just like Prynne’s letter-writing voice in the correspondence to Olson). Plus, there are also simply too many poems here, Prynne would have done better to cut the weaker material.
But the handful of strong poems here are always a pleasure to read. The moving “Thoughts on the Esterházy Court Uniform”, I feel quite sure, uses Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony as a metaphor for the irreversible passage of time and the gradual loss of everyone and ultimately our very selves to death. “How can we sustain such constant loss?” it asks. And the meditative “Moon Poem” seems to be a favourite:
Finally, Star Damage at Home with its title riffing on the word disaster – Prynne’s poetry is often just as etymological as semiotic – contains some astonishing lines that would destine this book for classic status even if Prynne’s work would only get better in the years to come:
The reissue of The White Stones in the NYRB Poets series is welcome. Besides an astute introduction by Peter Gizzi, it also includes two short pieces that Prynne published separately at the same time, “Day Light Songs” and “A Note on Metal”. But lovers of modernist poetry may well want to simply get Prynne’s collected Poems, so that they can immediately move from The White Stones on to the rest of a delightful career.
The century roar is a desert carrying
too much away; the plane skids off
with an easy hopeless departure.
The music, that it should
leave, is far down
in the mind
just as if the years were part of the
same sound, prolonged into the latent
action of the heart.
That is more: there
affection will shoot it up
like a crazed pilot. The desert
is a social and undedicated expanse, since
what else there is counts as merest propaganda.
The heart is a changed
petromorph, making
pressure a social
intelligence […].
It’s knotty stuff that does contain strong emotion but handles it obliquely, and the references are often extremely hermetic. Some of the references can be unlocked by a particularly erudite reader but, for example, “In Cimmerian Darkness” was never deciphered until a researcher noticed, totally by coincidence, a particular painting hanging in a room at Cambridge University that must have inspired Prynne.
Prynne’s reevaluation of his entire technique in the early 1960s, which produced these poems, came through a growing affinity with American modernist poets, as they offered an alternative to a British scene Prynne saw as staid and boring. Chief among these Americans was Charles Olson, with whom Prynne maintained a correspondence for some time. (In fact, that correspondence has been published and I recommend reading it, as some of The White Stones poems appeared first in Prynne’s letters and the context elucidates them.)
Just as Olson was at work on the huge Maximus project that draws in the history, geography, trade, economics of Massachusetts, Prynne’s poems in this volume range from Britain’s prehistory to present-day movements of capital. The “white stones” of the title are several, the moon and hail among them, but often the term alludes to glaciers. “The Glacial Question, Unresolved” and “On the Matter of Thermal Packing” depict modern Britain as literally shaped by the melting of the icy and weather patterns that persist to this day.
Economic references abound, too. One might assume that any 1960s Englishman talking this much about capital must have been a Bolshie and probably boring at parties, but if Prynne has radical politics (as opposed to mere detached interest) the reader can’t really tell. In any event, this look at economics isn’t all dour and serious, for it inspired one of the laugh-out-loud poems in this volume, “Foot and Mouth”, where Campbell’s Soup serves as a sign of nascent globalization.
Now Prynne’s next collection, Brass shows a much tighter prosody and flow of images which is highly conducive to memorization, so that the poems stay in the mind long enough for one to half-consciously ruminate on them until their meanings are cracked. The White Stones feels relatively weak because firstly, its poems aren’t as memorable. Most tend to be offputtingly long and chatty (many of the poems read just like Prynne’s letter-writing voice in the correspondence to Olson). Plus, there are also simply too many poems here, Prynne would have done better to cut the weaker material.
But the handful of strong poems here are always a pleasure to read. The moving “Thoughts on the Esterházy Court Uniform”, I feel quite sure, uses Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony as a metaphor for the irreversible passage of time and the gradual loss of everyone and ultimately our very selves to death. “How can we sustain such constant loss?” it asks. And the meditative “Moon Poem” seems to be a favourite:
The night is already quiet and I am
bound in the rise and fall: learning
to wish always for more. This is the
means, the extension to keep very steady
so that the culmination
will be silent too and flow
with no trace of devoutness.
Since I must hold to the gradual in
this, as no revolution but a slow change
like the image of snow. […]
Finally, Star Damage at Home with its title riffing on the word disaster – Prynne’s poetry is often just as etymological as semiotic – contains some astonishing lines that would destine this book for classic status even if Prynne’s work would only get better in the years to come:
And what is the chance for survival, in this
fertile calm, that we could mean what
we say, and hold to it? That some star
not included in the middle heavens should
pine in earth, not shine above the skies and
those cloudy vapours? That it really should
burn with fierce heat, explode its fierce &
unbearable song, blacken the calm it comes
near. A song like a glowing rivet strikes
out of the circle, we must make room for
the celestial victim; it is amongst us and
fallen with hissing fury into the ground. Too
lovely the ground and my confidence as I
walk so evenly above it: we must mean the
entire force of what we shall come to say. […]
The reissue of The White Stones in the NYRB Poets series is welcome. Besides an astute introduction by Peter Gizzi, it also includes two short pieces that Prynne published separately at the same time, “Day Light Songs” and “A Note on Metal”. But lovers of modernist poetry may well want to simply get Prynne’s collected Poems, so that they can immediately move from The White Stones on to the rest of a delightful career.
Read
November 12, 2022rambunctious and complicated but iconic in Jeremy's oeuvre. A brilliant and difficult one but this is kind of your classic early Prynne it's 1968 and the man is slinging what is still avant-garde today. love love this and so lucid contrast this to the work in 2014 or so - which I also love - but I'm here making a case for Prynne as wisdom lit, the cadence of the quartet.
June 8, 2020
Prynne is one of my greatest inspirations, 'Moon Poem' is possibly one of my favourite poems of all time - musing and calamitous and sweet all in one. His observational poems are by far the best. He writes with more honesty when he writes simply.
Read
May 4, 2026I’m honored that this was recommended to me, quite challenging and abstruse but somehow the diction wasn’t that complicated, more that the language was knotty, talky but deceptively so. But I also love rocks as a way to think about history, human and otherwise. The essay at the end was a funny choice (of the editors?) for someone so resistant to decoding but it did feel a bit like a key - made me read the stones, fire, ice that flashed in his poems as elements to be alchemized, transformed by the language and lineation, the way stone became metal became power then money over the course of early human history. In the dsa anticapitalist British poetry reading group we talked about how this metaphor brings together different time scales but might also be meant literally, bc prynne is old school - a Maoist - and believes in a dialectical interpretation of natural science, a “debunked” theory (by apparently everyone except my colleagues LOL). I wonder how I would feel about his later work bc I loved the lyricism and romanticism that peeked through, the dramatic endings. I love my dsa anticapitalist British poetry reading group
May 28, 2018
The blurb bills Prynne as "a legendary but in America still little-known contemporary master", which isn't false but might give the misleading impression he is a household name in his native Blighty, which isn't exactly the case. He and his comrades in the British Poetry Revival (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British...) were the antithesis of Larkin et al.'s return to rhyming and meaning and stuff.
This volume is beautifully produced - it does make a difference when the book is a beautiful object and the NYRB series are lovely - and the poetry is fabulous IF like me you like that sort of verbal psychedelia that always seems to be about to crystalise into sense but somehow never quite does. (Ashbury is the only other poet I know who can compare, although you would also have to do some contrasting.)
This volume is beautifully produced - it does make a difference when the book is a beautiful object and the NYRB series are lovely - and the poetry is fabulous IF like me you like that sort of verbal psychedelia that always seems to be about to crystalise into sense but somehow never quite does. (Ashbury is the only other poet I know who can compare, although you would also have to do some contrasting.)
Read
March 16, 2026An interesting but incredibly challenging poetry collection. Didn't get a lot from this but I can see myself revisiting it in the future.
May 7, 2026
from Moon Poem
I would probably not even choose to inahbit the
wish as delay: it really is dark and the knowledge
of the unseen is a warmth which spreads into
the level ceremony of diffusion. The quiet
suggests that the act taken
extends so much further, there
is this insurgence of form (22)
from Love in the Air
If he gives, the even tenor of his open
hands, this is display, the way and through
to a life of soft invasion.
[...]
I ask
for all of it, being
ready to break
every constant thing.
We are bound and
we break, we let loose
what we nakedly hold
thus, he turns
she watches, the
hills slip, time
changes hands. (25)
For a Quiet Day
I want the gentler
course, where
the evening is more of what we are:
or the day as well—moist, casual,
broken by inflictions of touch. (28)
The Glacial Question, Unsolved
In the matter of ice, the invasions
were partial, so that the frost
was a beautiful head
the sky cloudy
and the day packed into the crystal
as the thrust slowed and we come to
a stand, along the coast of Norfolk.
That is a relative point, and since
the relation was part to part, the
gliding was cursive; a retreat, followed
by advance, right to north London. The
moraine runs axial to the Finchley Road
including hippopotamus, which isn’t a
joke any more than the present fringe
of intellectual habit. They did live as
the evidence is ready, for the successive
drift.
Hunstanton to Wells is the clear
margin, from which hills rise into
the “interior”; the stages broken through
by the lobe bent south-west into the Wash
and that sudden warmth which took
birch trees up into Scotland. As
the 50° isotherm retreats there is
that secular weather laid down in pollen
and the separable advances on Cromer (easterly)
and on Gipping (mostly to the south).
The striations are part of the heart’s
desire, the parkland of what is coast
inwards from which, rather than the reverse.
And as the caps melted, the eustatic rise
in the sea-level curls round the clay, the
basal rise, what we hope to call “land”.
And the curving spine of the cretaceous
ridge, masked as it is by the drift, is
wedged up to the thrust: the ice fronting
the earlier marine, so that the sentiment
of “cliffs” is the weathered stump of a feeling
into the worst climate of all.
Or if that’s
too violent, then it’s the closest balance that
holds the tilt: land/sea to icecap from
parkland, not more than 2°–3° F. The
oscillation must have been so delicate, almost
each contour on the rock spine is a weather
limit
the ice smoothing the humps off,
filling the hollows with sandy clay
as the litter of “surface”. As the roads
run dripping across this, the rhythm
is the declension of history, the facts
in succession, they are succession, and
the limits are not time but ridges
and thermal delays, plus or minus whatever
carbon dates we have.
We are rocked
in this hollow, in the ladle by which
the sky, less cloudy now, rests on our
foreheads. Our climate is maritime, and
“it is questionable whether there has yet been
sufficient change in the marine faunas
to justify a claim that
the Pleistocene Epoch itself
has come to an end.” We live in that
question, it is a condition of fact: as we
move it adjusts the horizon: belts of forest,
the Chilterns, up into the Wolds of Yorkshire.
The falling movement, the light cloud
blowing in from the ice of Norfolk
“thrust. As the dew recedes from the grass
towards noon the line of recession
slips back. We know where the north
is, the ice is an evening whiteness.
We know this, we are what it leaves:
the Pleistocene is our current sense, and
what in sentiment we are, we
are, the coast, a line or sequence, the
cut back down, to the shore. (35-37)
from First Notes on Daylight
Patience is truly me device, as we wait
for the past to happen, which is to come into
the open. As I expect it to, daily & the ques-
tion is really what size we're in, how much of
it is the measure, at one time. Patience is
the sum of my inertia, by which the base-line
lays itself out to the touch
like the flower in
heaven, each pebble
graded in ochre. (41)
from Frost and Snow, Falling
That is, a quality of man and his becoming,
beautiful, or the decoration of some light and
fixed decision, no less fluent than the river
which guards its name. (43)
In Cimmerian Darkness
When the faint star does take
us into the deeper parts
of the night there is
that sudden dip
and we swing across into
some other version of this
present age, where any curving
trust is set into
the nature of man, the green raw and fabulous
love of it, where every star that shines,
as he said, exists
in love, the brother
dipping into the equal limit,
help as the ready art, condition of the
normal
since no more simple
presence will fade, as the dawn does, over
water, the colonies of feeling like stacks
of banknotes waiting to be counted.
Anyone waits, the brother is a section of
the waiting art, whereby and
through which agency the whole
cosmic vibrations disport their limbs, their
hopes, the distant repose.
We dip into the ready world
which waits for us: the
name of it is our brother and we must pro-
tect what we want of it,
as we need more than I personally
can ever admit. Or now do so
admit, the title to this going into the sky
is the trust of the lighted brother in the
first sense, the standard.
Stand there, I implore you, the trust is an agency
of surrender, I give it all up, the star
is yielded. No part of this dipping
coil shall be withheld; no
light further than the figure of some complete
fortune, making and made weak
by affection and the promise of it.
Led to the star, trusting to rotten planks,
the equal limit, we must have it, I ask only
in sequence, in this parity of
art ready with its own motion. It swings out
and we are quickly cruel, the brother reforms
his wish to roam the streets, he
should refuse as much as he can.
Nor is the divine in any sense
full, the vacancy stretches away
to the standard out on the plain; the cups
of our radio telescopes stand openly
braced to catch the recoil. Focus, the
hearth is again warm, again the human patch
waits, glows in the slight wind.
And we are ready for this, the array is there in
the figure we name brother, the
fortune we wish for, devoutly, as the dip
turns us to the face we have
so long ignored; so fervently refused. (48)
from Shadow Songs
The glorious dead, walking
barefoot on the earth.
Treat them with all you
have: on the black marble
and let Nightingale come
down from the hills.
Only the procession is halted
as this spills down into
the current of the river:
their glorious death, if
such on earth were found. (56)
from On the Matter of Thermal Packing
In the days of time now what I have
is the meltwater constantly round my feet
and ankles. There the ice is glory to the
past and the eloquence, the gentility of
the world's being; I have known this
as a competence for so long that the
start is buried in light
usual as the warm grass and shrubbery
which should have been ancestral
or still but was, then, bound like crystal
into the last war. (59)
[...]
the forms frozen in familiar remoteness (61)
from Thoughts on the Esterhazy Court Uniform
With such
patience maybe we can listen to the rain
without always thinking about rain (79)
Whose Dust Did You Say
How old how far & how much the
years tear at us the shreds of cloth as
I think of them and the great palaces
with courts & the sounds of mirth
merriment in the darkness within the
great dream of the night. I live still
with the bitter habits of that fire &
disdain I live in it surrounded by
little else who can impair or bound
that empire of destined habitation
or go off into that coyly drab town
by slow stages or by any other damn
thing else who can who would waste
his time who would fritter his time
away how the years now do encircle
the season and when is a wage a
salary by dead reckoning from the
merest centre of the earth the
mere & lovely centre, of the earth. (81)
Star Damage at Home
The draft runs deeper now & the motion
relaxes its hold, so that I pass freely from
habit to form and to the sign complete
without unfolding—the bright shoots in the
night sky or the quick local tremor of leaves.
Where this goes is a scattered circle, each
house set on a level and related by time
to the persons whose lives now openly
have them in train. Each one drawn in
by promise recalled, just as the day itself
unlocks the white stone. Rain as it
falls down turns to the level of name, the
table slanting off with its concealed glint.
And what is the chance for survival, in this
fertile calm, that we could mean what
we say, and hold to it? That some star
not included in the middle heavens should
pine in earth, not shine above the skies and
those cloudy vapours? That it really should
burn with fierce heat, explode its fierce &
unbearable song, blacken the calm it comes
near. A song like a glowing rivet strikes
out of the circle, we must make room for
the celestial victim; it is amongst us and
fallen with hissing fury into the ground. Too
lovely the ground and my confidence as I
walk so evenly above it: we must mean the
entire force of what we shall come to say.
I cannot run with these deeply implicit
motions, the person is nothing, there should be
torture in our midst. Some coarsely exploited
money-making trick, fast & destructive, shrill
havoc to the murmur of names. The
blaze of violent purpose at least, struck
through : light : we desire what we mean
& we must mean that & consume to
ash any simple deflection:
I will not be led
by the mean-
ing of my
tinsel past or
this fecund hint
I merely live in. Destruction is too
good for it, like Cassius I flaunt the path
of some cosmic disaster. Fix the eye on
the feast of hatred forcing the civil war
in the U.S., the smoke towering above the
mere words splitting like glass into the
air. The divinity of light spread through
the day, the mortal cloud like no more than
heat haze, that thing is the idea of blood
raised to a final snow-capped abstraction. I
mean what the name has in its charge,
being not deceived by the dispersal which
sets it down. We live in compulsion, no
less, we must have the damage by which
the stars burn in their courses, we take/
set/twist/dispose of the rest. There is
no pause, no mild admixture. This is to
crush it to the centre, the angelic song shines
with embittered passion; there is no price
too high for the force running uncontrolled
into the cloud nearest the earth. We live here
and must mean it, the last person we are. (89)
from Starvation/Dream
The ground out-
side mistily involves itself with its
contour, the leaky boat glides down
the morning flood, in this rival
dream all our enemies are with us
and the animals & plants shall
take nourishment from the same
silent and passionless table. (99)
Smaller than the Radius of the Planet
There is a patch like ice in the sky this
evening & the wind tacks about, we are
both stopped/fingered by it. I lay out my
unrest like white lines on the slope, so that
something out of broken sleep will land
there. Look up, a vale of sorrow opened by
eyes anywhere above us, the child spread out
in his memory of darkness. And so, then, the
magnetic influence of Venus sweeps its
shiver into the heart/brain or hypothalamus,
we are still here, I look steadily at nothing.
“The gradient of the decrease may be de-
termined by the spread in intrinsic lumin-
osities”—the ethereal language of love in
brilliant suspense between us and the
hesitant arc. Yet I need it too and keep
one hand in my pocket & one in yours,
waiting for the first snow of the year. (100)
I would probably not even choose to inahbit the
wish as delay: it really is dark and the knowledge
of the unseen is a warmth which spreads into
the level ceremony of diffusion. The quiet
suggests that the act taken
extends so much further, there
is this insurgence of form (22)
from Love in the Air
If he gives, the even tenor of his open
hands, this is display, the way and through
to a life of soft invasion.
[...]
I ask
for all of it, being
ready to break
every constant thing.
We are bound and
we break, we let loose
what we nakedly hold
thus, he turns
she watches, the
hills slip, time
changes hands. (25)
For a Quiet Day
I want the gentler
course, where
the evening is more of what we are:
or the day as well—moist, casual,
broken by inflictions of touch. (28)
The Glacial Question, Unsolved
In the matter of ice, the invasions
were partial, so that the frost
was a beautiful head
the sky cloudy
and the day packed into the crystal
as the thrust slowed and we come to
a stand, along the coast of Norfolk.
That is a relative point, and since
the relation was part to part, the
gliding was cursive; a retreat, followed
by advance, right to north London. The
moraine runs axial to the Finchley Road
including hippopotamus, which isn’t a
joke any more than the present fringe
of intellectual habit. They did live as
the evidence is ready, for the successive
drift.
Hunstanton to Wells is the clear
margin, from which hills rise into
the “interior”; the stages broken through
by the lobe bent south-west into the Wash
and that sudden warmth which took
birch trees up into Scotland. As
the 50° isotherm retreats there is
that secular weather laid down in pollen
and the separable advances on Cromer (easterly)
and on Gipping (mostly to the south).
The striations are part of the heart’s
desire, the parkland of what is coast
inwards from which, rather than the reverse.
And as the caps melted, the eustatic rise
in the sea-level curls round the clay, the
basal rise, what we hope to call “land”.
And the curving spine of the cretaceous
ridge, masked as it is by the drift, is
wedged up to the thrust: the ice fronting
the earlier marine, so that the sentiment
of “cliffs” is the weathered stump of a feeling
into the worst climate of all.
Or if that’s
too violent, then it’s the closest balance that
holds the tilt: land/sea to icecap from
parkland, not more than 2°–3° F. The
oscillation must have been so delicate, almost
each contour on the rock spine is a weather
limit
the ice smoothing the humps off,
filling the hollows with sandy clay
as the litter of “surface”. As the roads
run dripping across this, the rhythm
is the declension of history, the facts
in succession, they are succession, and
the limits are not time but ridges
and thermal delays, plus or minus whatever
carbon dates we have.
We are rocked
in this hollow, in the ladle by which
the sky, less cloudy now, rests on our
foreheads. Our climate is maritime, and
“it is questionable whether there has yet been
sufficient change in the marine faunas
to justify a claim that
the Pleistocene Epoch itself
has come to an end.” We live in that
question, it is a condition of fact: as we
move it adjusts the horizon: belts of forest,
the Chilterns, up into the Wolds of Yorkshire.
The falling movement, the light cloud
blowing in from the ice of Norfolk
“thrust. As the dew recedes from the grass
towards noon the line of recession
slips back. We know where the north
is, the ice is an evening whiteness.
We know this, we are what it leaves:
the Pleistocene is our current sense, and
what in sentiment we are, we
are, the coast, a line or sequence, the
cut back down, to the shore. (35-37)
from First Notes on Daylight
Patience is truly me device, as we wait
for the past to happen, which is to come into
the open. As I expect it to, daily & the ques-
tion is really what size we're in, how much of
it is the measure, at one time. Patience is
the sum of my inertia, by which the base-line
lays itself out to the touch
like the flower in
heaven, each pebble
graded in ochre. (41)
from Frost and Snow, Falling
That is, a quality of man and his becoming,
beautiful, or the decoration of some light and
fixed decision, no less fluent than the river
which guards its name. (43)
In Cimmerian Darkness
When the faint star does take
us into the deeper parts
of the night there is
that sudden dip
and we swing across into
some other version of this
present age, where any curving
trust is set into
the nature of man, the green raw and fabulous
love of it, where every star that shines,
as he said, exists
in love, the brother
dipping into the equal limit,
help as the ready art, condition of the
normal
since no more simple
presence will fade, as the dawn does, over
water, the colonies of feeling like stacks
of banknotes waiting to be counted.
Anyone waits, the brother is a section of
the waiting art, whereby and
through which agency the whole
cosmic vibrations disport their limbs, their
hopes, the distant repose.
We dip into the ready world
which waits for us: the
name of it is our brother and we must pro-
tect what we want of it,
as we need more than I personally
can ever admit. Or now do so
admit, the title to this going into the sky
is the trust of the lighted brother in the
first sense, the standard.
Stand there, I implore you, the trust is an agency
of surrender, I give it all up, the star
is yielded. No part of this dipping
coil shall be withheld; no
light further than the figure of some complete
fortune, making and made weak
by affection and the promise of it.
Led to the star, trusting to rotten planks,
the equal limit, we must have it, I ask only
in sequence, in this parity of
art ready with its own motion. It swings out
and we are quickly cruel, the brother reforms
his wish to roam the streets, he
should refuse as much as he can.
Nor is the divine in any sense
full, the vacancy stretches away
to the standard out on the plain; the cups
of our radio telescopes stand openly
braced to catch the recoil. Focus, the
hearth is again warm, again the human patch
waits, glows in the slight wind.
And we are ready for this, the array is there in
the figure we name brother, the
fortune we wish for, devoutly, as the dip
turns us to the face we have
so long ignored; so fervently refused. (48)
from Shadow Songs
The glorious dead, walking
barefoot on the earth.
Treat them with all you
have: on the black marble
and let Nightingale come
down from the hills.
Only the procession is halted
as this spills down into
the current of the river:
their glorious death, if
such on earth were found. (56)
from On the Matter of Thermal Packing
In the days of time now what I have
is the meltwater constantly round my feet
and ankles. There the ice is glory to the
past and the eloquence, the gentility of
the world's being; I have known this
as a competence for so long that the
start is buried in light
usual as the warm grass and shrubbery
which should have been ancestral
or still but was, then, bound like crystal
into the last war. (59)
[...]
the forms frozen in familiar remoteness (61)
from Thoughts on the Esterhazy Court Uniform
With such
patience maybe we can listen to the rain
without always thinking about rain (79)
Whose Dust Did You Say
How old how far & how much the
years tear at us the shreds of cloth as
I think of them and the great palaces
with courts & the sounds of mirth
merriment in the darkness within the
great dream of the night. I live still
with the bitter habits of that fire &
disdain I live in it surrounded by
little else who can impair or bound
that empire of destined habitation
or go off into that coyly drab town
by slow stages or by any other damn
thing else who can who would waste
his time who would fritter his time
away how the years now do encircle
the season and when is a wage a
salary by dead reckoning from the
merest centre of the earth the
mere & lovely centre, of the earth. (81)
Star Damage at Home
The draft runs deeper now & the motion
relaxes its hold, so that I pass freely from
habit to form and to the sign complete
without unfolding—the bright shoots in the
night sky or the quick local tremor of leaves.
Where this goes is a scattered circle, each
house set on a level and related by time
to the persons whose lives now openly
have them in train. Each one drawn in
by promise recalled, just as the day itself
unlocks the white stone. Rain as it
falls down turns to the level of name, the
table slanting off with its concealed glint.
And what is the chance for survival, in this
fertile calm, that we could mean what
we say, and hold to it? That some star
not included in the middle heavens should
pine in earth, not shine above the skies and
those cloudy vapours? That it really should
burn with fierce heat, explode its fierce &
unbearable song, blacken the calm it comes
near. A song like a glowing rivet strikes
out of the circle, we must make room for
the celestial victim; it is amongst us and
fallen with hissing fury into the ground. Too
lovely the ground and my confidence as I
walk so evenly above it: we must mean the
entire force of what we shall come to say.
I cannot run with these deeply implicit
motions, the person is nothing, there should be
torture in our midst. Some coarsely exploited
money-making trick, fast & destructive, shrill
havoc to the murmur of names. The
blaze of violent purpose at least, struck
through : light : we desire what we mean
& we must mean that & consume to
ash any simple deflection:
I will not be led
by the mean-
ing of my
tinsel past or
this fecund hint
I merely live in. Destruction is too
good for it, like Cassius I flaunt the path
of some cosmic disaster. Fix the eye on
the feast of hatred forcing the civil war
in the U.S., the smoke towering above the
mere words splitting like glass into the
air. The divinity of light spread through
the day, the mortal cloud like no more than
heat haze, that thing is the idea of blood
raised to a final snow-capped abstraction. I
mean what the name has in its charge,
being not deceived by the dispersal which
sets it down. We live in compulsion, no
less, we must have the damage by which
the stars burn in their courses, we take/
set/twist/dispose of the rest. There is
no pause, no mild admixture. This is to
crush it to the centre, the angelic song shines
with embittered passion; there is no price
too high for the force running uncontrolled
into the cloud nearest the earth. We live here
and must mean it, the last person we are. (89)
from Starvation/Dream
The ground out-
side mistily involves itself with its
contour, the leaky boat glides down
the morning flood, in this rival
dream all our enemies are with us
and the animals & plants shall
take nourishment from the same
silent and passionless table. (99)
Smaller than the Radius of the Planet
There is a patch like ice in the sky this
evening & the wind tacks about, we are
both stopped/fingered by it. I lay out my
unrest like white lines on the slope, so that
something out of broken sleep will land
there. Look up, a vale of sorrow opened by
eyes anywhere above us, the child spread out
in his memory of darkness. And so, then, the
magnetic influence of Venus sweeps its
shiver into the heart/brain or hypothalamus,
we are still here, I look steadily at nothing.
“The gradient of the decrease may be de-
termined by the spread in intrinsic lumin-
osities”—the ethereal language of love in
brilliant suspense between us and the
hesitant arc. Yet I need it too and keep
one hand in my pocket & one in yours,
waiting for the first snow of the year. (100)
December 28, 2018
Remarkable, re-engaged me with poetry, every time I pick it up I learn something new. Not an easy read.
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May 16, 2024Inconclusivo
April 18, 2025
'The night is already quiet and I am
bound in the rise and fall: learning
to wish always for more'
bound in the rise and fall: learning
to wish always for more'
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April 28, 2026bro, “music is truly the sound of our time”
January 10, 2008
Late Zuk, say "A"-22 and 23. Language so thoroughly distilled!We are moving here into fractals, those rigors.
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