“The most important book of poems published in England in the 1960s”
PRYNNE, J. H. The White Stones. Lincoln: Grosseteste Press. 1969.
8vo. Original green cloth-covered wrappers lettered white and black to spine and front panel, with “white stones” motif framed in black to lower half of front panel; pp. [8], 11-96, [2]; rubbed to spine tips and (a touch) to outer corners, page-block edges a little dusty; a near fine copy.
First edition; number of 452 of 477 copies of the edition in wrappers.
The White Stones, J.H. Prynne’s second full collection – following the withdrawn Force of Circumstance (1962) – has become something of a touchstone, or talisman, for many readers (and many poets, Peter Riley describing it as “the most important book of poems published in England in the 1960s”). At the time, the English poetry world was dominated by Faber poets, English and American, the books, many very fine, principally vehicles for lyric poetry, “confessional” or otherwise, of a relatively familiar stripe. Issued in 1969 by Gordon and Helene Jackson’s Lincoln-based Grosseteste Press, The White Stones was and remains a breath of fresh air, tapping into currents of contemporary American poetry and poetics even now relatively unexplored this side of the Atlantic, notably the writings of Prynne’s friend and correspondent Charles Olson, whose “open field” poetics aimed to circumvent the sovereignty of the lyric subject (“the […] interference of the individual”) by keeping in play “the full circuit of object, image, action”, the emphasis “no longer THINGS but what happens BETWEEN things” – and between competing, sometimes clashing, discourses (of science, politics, economics, mathematics and, not least, literature).
The White Stones, however, is lyrical, and recognisably English in sensibility. Addressing love, loss, grief, as well as “the brutalised evasions of international politics” (Cook), the poems, Peter Gizzi writes, “are faceted like crystal to daylight, or as Prynne would have it: ‘The striations are part of the heart’s / desire.’”
The book was issued in an edition of 477 numbered copies in wrappers, and an unknown quantity of the hardback variant. A lettered edition of 26 copies, printed on tinted paper, also in 1969, was not issued until the 1990s, when the sheets were bound in green buckram and sold by Peter Riley. Clean, bright copies in any format are increasingly elusive.
See Peter Gizzi, Introduction, The White Stones (New York: NYRB, 2016); Charles Olson, Human Universe and Other Essays (New York: Grove Press, 1967); Elizabeth Cook, “Prynne’s Principia”, London Review of Books, Vol. 4 No. 17, September 1982.
Tencer (b).
#2123741