HIGH PINK ON CHROME

First edition, first printing. One of 500 copies. Original metallic pink card wrappers, with integral flaps. Printed on laid paper. A near fine copy, the binding firm, the contents clean throughout. The spine area is, as usual, faded, with a few patches of surface abrasion to the inner margin of the front panel. Printed on laid paper by the Saffron Walden Press. An nice copy. Scarce.

The poet's tenth volume. "[H]e is using a vocabulary and a poetic method which have still to be learned by those who read poetry and those who profess to read poetry. In this new book, a series of phrases (not, emphatically not, a series of 'images' or a number of thoughts) are pressed into tightly constructed forms by the power of an imagination which changes the surface of language. [N]otations of physical collapse, and presentations of the English landscape and its seasons, are transformed by Prynne's dazzling and authoritative uses of the language. The poem becomes an emblem, attracting and dispersing several variants of poetic writing within a small space. [...] By refusing to become a readily accessible and intelligible writer, he has ensured that poetry can no longer be treated as a deodorized museum of fine thoughts and fine feelings; he is creating instead a complete and a coherent language." (Peter Ackroyd, 'The Spectator', 20 December 1975).