Checking In

No posts for a while so I thought it would be good to check in. Recent mergers and acquisitions include JH Prynne's brand new collection, To Pollen, which is remarkable. It is a sequence of 22 13-line poems, beautifully published by Barque Press. I have read it through a few times so far, but intend to do a more thorough study soon. The metrical, sonic and semantic variety and, yes, beauty is amazing. It seems to carry on, in a more developed form, the exploration of political explicitness in the midst of modernist pyrotechnics that can be seen in Prynne's 2004 poem about Abu Ghraib, 'Refuse Collection'. What other poet could write a sequence including both this passage:

Agree fillet weld tournament at
whirling dared inscript, flaw in sand for a trial
worsened by braving outcry points, they assembled
in total yes to perform

and the following:

we see shots of a father racked
in misery and bearing like a gift his crushed and
bloodied son, a bare infant

?


Wheeling my double bass through Oxford the other day someone shouted after me 'Eric Clapton', which was interesting if mistaken. Better than the usual comments - of course I do wish I played the recorder. Not the best, though - that prize still goes to the guy who turned to his girlfriend on Little Clarendon Street and said 'Look, it's a midget with a violin'.