KITCHEN POEMS

First edition, first printing. Limited edition, signed by the author. Original red cloth lettered in silver to the spine, in dustwrapper. Dark brown endpapers, double title page printed in black and red, the four sections of the book divided by pale green patterned pages numbered in red. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. In the dustwrapper, rubbed, nicked, and a little browned to spine tips and corners. Clipped by the publisher with "Signed £6" written in pencil to the front flap to distinguish this signed and numbered copy from the trade edition.

Signed and numbered by the author in black ink to the first page of the double title-page. This copy is number 2 of 50 copies signed and numbered by the author, out of an edition of 2700 copies: 2000 soft cover and 700 case bound. The US edition was issued the same year by Grossman Publishers Inc., New York in an edition of 1400 copies: 1000 soft cover and 400 case bound. 'Kitchen Poems' was essentially J. H. Prynne's second attempt at a first book. Of the earlier 'Force of Circumstance and Other Poems' (Routledge, 1962), the poet now recalls that even as it "was being prepared for publication, I'd fallen out of love with it [and] would probably have suppressed it if it had been a practical possibility at the time". It has never been reprinted and is absent from the various iterations of Prynne's collected poems, all of which open with 'Kitchen Poems'. Frst published in this beautifully produced form by Cape Goliard Press in 1968, the book, along with the following year's 'The White Stones' are the foundations of the poet's still (rapidly) growing body of work. Prynne's former student and fellow poet, Keston Sutherland boldly asserts that the two books "set out [...] a prospectus for philosophic song so astronomically demanding that Manilius [the first century Roman poet and astronomer] might have shrunk from it in trepidation". If the singing is more characteristic of The White Stones, the more "acerbic and politically focused" 'Kitchen Poems' introduces to English poetry a new voice, its intellectual reach and confident command of 'non-poetic' languages (notably that of economics) showing the influence of Pound and Charles Olson but utterly distinct: "And the drift of that is again to divert the / currency (as now in England / to the north-east). As, it was actually losing its grip / on the population: real people, slipping off / the face of that lovely ground, leaving the green & pleasant lands of Northumberland / to be nearer the belly & catch scraps / with the shit we set out so grudgingly / on plates for the blind to eat in gratitude." ('Die A Millionaire (pronounced "diamonds in the air")') (Tencer).