The White Stones
$35.74
- Paperback
136 pages
- Release Date
15 May 2016
Summary
This is the first US appearance of J. H. Prynne’s most important work, The White Stones, a key document in the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s and a pinnacle work in this important, avant-garde poet’s vast oeuvre.
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 …
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781590179796 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 159017979X |
| Author: | J.H. Prynne |
| Publisher: | New York Review Books |
| Imprint: | NYRB Poets |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 136 |
| Edition: | Main |
| Release Date: | 15 May 2016 |
| Weight: | 126g |
| Dimensions: | 7mm x 115mm x 178mm |
| Series: | NYRB Poets |
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Critics Review
“[Prynne’s poetry] can induce the same combinations of fear and wonder once associated with the sublime…It is undeniable that his poetry offers both pleasures and challenges of an unusually complex kind: and it is for precisely this reason that many people will testify, without hyperbole or sentimentality, that his poetry has changed their lives.”—Robert Potts, The Guardian
“Prynne’s work is challenging, yes, but also funny…politically incisive, erotic, and philosophical. It puts into play the most diverse range of discourses imaginable and doesn’t make it easy for the reader to decide how or even with what attitude to respond…Prynne’s work reminds us that poetry, besides offering a variety of sensorial and emotional pleasures, can be something with which to think.”—Forrest Gander, Chicago Review
J.H. Prynne
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 between 1968 and 2015, all of which are reprinted in the third enlarged edition of his Poems (Bloodaxe Books, Hexham, 2015).
The White Stones, a collection of poems, was composed in the early 1960s. During this period, Prynne was working with students on English and European poetry from various classical traditions, while also engaging with the influence of the New American Poetry of that era. His working knowledge of French, German, and Italian provided a broad historical perspective, and a limited understanding of Chinese revealed the influence of Ezra Pound in a new context.
Since that time, Prynne has also published extended commentary-essays on topics such as the Han Chinese lyric, a painting by Willem de Kooning, and various literary and linguistic subjects. He has also authored three extended commentary-monographs: on a Shakespearean sonnet, on poems by Wordsworth and George Herbert, on Wallace Stevens, and on a scroll painting by the Chinese landscape painter Shen Zhou (1425-1509).
Prynne has traveled extensively in the USA and internationally. His poems have been translated into French, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Chinese, with a selection being prepared in Mexican Spanish. Additionally, his work has inspired musical settings and adaptations. His collected prose writings in two volumes are currently in preparation.
Peter Gizzi is the author of several poetry collections, including Threshold Songs, The Outernationale, and In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987-2011. His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets, and artist grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Howard Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has served as the poetry editor for The Nation and as founding editor of o ble k: a journal of language arts. In 2011 and again in 2015-16, he was the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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