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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
152 pages, Paperback
First published March 29, 2016
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About the author
J.H. Prynne
66 books24 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 - 8 of 8 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.
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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.
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.)
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'
January 10, 2008
Late Zuk, say "A"-22 and 23. Language so thoroughly distilled!We are moving here into fractals, those rigors.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews