The oval window

by J.H. Prynne

This volume is a new annotated edition of J.H. Prynne's 1983 poem The Oval Window, making use of photographs taken by the poet at the time and place of composition, together with a substantial portfolio supplied by him of source and reference material. This source material includes political and economic news published during the period in early autumn 1983 when the poem was written, together with extracts from literature, Eastern and Western philosophy, optics, anatomy, computer programming language, and a considerable quantity of ancient Chinese poetry. The edition has two commentary essays: the first primarily concerned with approaches to reading, including the use of search engines, and with the relations between different elements in the work, and the second with the topography and the critical antecedents of the poem. For ease of reading, a clean reading text is included as well as the annotated text. The expanded third edition of Prynne's Poems (2015) was published by Bloodaxe in 2015.

Genres: Poetry

34 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1983

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

[michal k-c · Rating 5 out of 5]

Apocalyptic and bleak like Arnold, hard to read this annotated edition and not come away feeling like Prynne is one of the most important (and also under read) poets of the 20th (and 21st!) century. The annotations allow all sorts of schizoaffective networks of dense references and allusions to be drawn, but the sheer expressionistic force of the work (which is printed first with no annotations) deserves your attention

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

J. H. Prynne's poetry had become increasingly modernist and challenging in the decade-plus leading up to The Oval Window, but this long poem written in August and September 1983 immediately stood out from its forebears as more communicative and poignant, and directly confronting – among other things – contemporary Britain under Thatcher. That is not to say that Prynne has retreated in any way from high modernism, and the opening lines of this poem are intractable in a fashion representative of much of his mature poetry:

The shut inch lively as pin grafting
leads back to the gift shop, at a loss
for two-ply particles
set callow,
set bland and clean, wailing as when
to wait is block for scatter.

Immediately after this, however, the poem begins to employ a series of recognizable languages, even if they constantly shift nearly from line to line: financial news, computer science and the basics of programming languages, and quotations from Elizabeth and Romantic-era English poetry. Especially those references to computer-programming will demand an unusually erudite reader, but among the rewards for those is a great pun – in spite of being a Cambridge don and a “serious modernist”, Prynne occasionally indulges in some mordant humor:

As what next if you can’t, silent fire
dumped in a skip and sun boiling over
the sack race. […]
From the skip there is honey and bent metal,
romantic on trade plate: PUT SKIP EDIT,
PUT SKIP DATA, the control flow structure
demands a check that subscripts do not exceed
array dimensions.

From early on the motif of “vantage point” is present in the poem, and by the midpoint Prynne identifies that vantage point as a particular place. The cover photograph is of a window in the wall of a dilapidated hut in northern England, used centuries ago by shepherds during the summer months. Prynne had visited this site personally and taken that photograph:

It is not quite a cabin, but (in local speech)
a shield, in the elbow of upland water,
the sod roof almost gone but just under
its scar a rough opening: it is, in first
sight, the oval window. Last light foams
at this crest.

But the oval window is also a structure in the human ear, and Prynne begins to play on the similarity to snow of the tiny calcium carbonate flakes in the ear, which help human beings maintain balance and know where they are located in space:

As they parted, she heard his horse cry out,
by the rustic lodge in a flurry of snow.
A child’s joy, a toy with a snowstorm,
flakes settling in white prisms, to slide
to a stop. The flask is without frame,
metaldehyde safe in cold store. There
is a snow-down on that sand hillock,
the stars are snowing, do you see it there:
bright moonlight whitens the pear blossom.
You listen out by the oval window, as
calm waves flow onward to the horizon.

That passage shows another remarkable turn in the poem: lots of quotations from classical Chinese poetry. This layer of the poem is identifiable from references to typically non-Western imagery like fruit trees and screens painted with landscapes. Many of the poems quoted, it turns out, involve their Chinese characters looking out a window in expectation. The result is that The Oval Window brings together East and West, the English moorland of recent centuries that Prynne had just visited and China of a millennium ago:

Pear blossoms drift through this garden,
across the watcher's vantage clouded
by smoke from inside the hut. Tunnel
vision as she watches for his return,
face and flower shining each upon the other.
So these did turn, return, advance,
drawn back by doubt, put on by love.
Sort and merge, there is burning along
this frame…

The publication of an annotated edition is welcome, as it clears up some mysteries about the poem without, however, breaking the magic. Prynne gave editors N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge access to the many photographs (besides the cover image) that he had taken on his visit to the hut, and newspaper clippings from 1983 that inspired his depiction of contemporary Britain. Furthermore, the editors explain that this hut is located a stone’s throw from the ruins of a missile silo from Britain’s sole attempt, abandoned in the 1960, at a ground-based nuclear-weapons program. This sheds light on the phrase "blue streak" (the code name for the planned missiles) in the poem and, Reeve suggests, allows us to read some of the imagery as depicting nuclear devastation, such an oppressive possibility at the time Prynne wrote The Oval Window.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

beautiful work in an odd era for JHP there's a great review here by one Christopher which neatly works through this collection and I'm grateful for him thank you

politically bubbling simmering too Prynne here is absolutely crawling towards the late himself. Computer programming and I suspect physics of deposition too. hm hm

[Kevin Holden · Rating 5 out of 5]

omni oval omg!