Jeremy Halvard Prynne

Jeremy Halvard Prynne Poems

Jeremy Halvard Prynne Biography

Jeremy Halvard Prynne (born June 24, 1936) is a British poet closely associated with the British Poetry Revival. Prynne's early influences include Charles Olson and Donald Davie. His first book, Force of Circumstance and Other Poems was published in 1962; Prynne has excluded it from his canon. His Poems (1982) collected all the work he wanted to keep in print up to the time of publication, beginning with Kitchen Poems (1968). An expanded and updated version appeared in 1999, with another, further updated, published in 2005, and another in 2015. Prynne was one of the key figures in the Cambridge group of Revival poets and was a major contributor to The English Intelligencer.)

The Best Poem Of Jeremy Halvard Prynne

Rich in Vitamin C

Under her brow the snowy wing-case
delivers truly the surprise
of days which slide under sunlight
past loose glass in the door
into the reflection of honour spread
through the incomplete, the trusted. So
darkly the stain skips as a livery
of your pause like an apple pip,
the baltic loved one who sleeps.

Or as syrup in a cloud, down below in
the cup, you excuse each folded
cry of the finch's wit, this flush
scattered over our slant of the
day rocked in water, you say
this much. A waver of attention at
the surface, shews the arch there and
the purpose we really cut;
an ounce down by the water, which

in cross-fire from injustice too large
to hold he lets slither
from starry fingers
noting the herbal jolt of cordite
and its echo: is this our screen, on some
street we hardly guessed could mark
an idea bred to idiocy by the clear
sight-lines ahead. You come in
by the same door, you carry

what cannot be left for its own
sweet shimmer of reason, its false blood;
the same tint I hear with the pulse it touches
and will not melt. Such shading
of the rose to its stock tips the bolt
from the sky, rising in its effect of what
motto we call peace talks. And yes the
quiet turn of your page is the day
tilting so, faded in the light.

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