KITCHEN POEMS

First edition, first printing. Paperback issue. Original illustrated card wrappers, brown double endpapers. Printed on laid paper. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. A few light surface marks to the rear panel. Priced 13/6 net to the rear panel. A very nice copy.

Issued in 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' which, along with the following year's 'The White Stones' laid the foundations for the poet's still (rapidly) growing body of work. Prynne's former student and fellow poet, Keston Sutherland has asserted 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 with an intellectual reach and confident command of 'non-poetic' languages (notably that of economics) recalling Pound and Charles Olson, but completely 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).