Keston: I'm not sure I have that much to say about the reviews of note,
though certainly the blunt assertion of Prynne as Marxist at the start was
one thing that bugged me from the off. The Prynne piece is very careless,
starting with its getting the book's title wrong (not _Collected Poems_ but
_Poems_); it says there are several poems in Chinese (there is exactly
one); it says there are two essays (there is exactly one; even the quickest
readthrough of "The Plant-Time Manifold Transcripts" should reveal it not
to be discursive prose); a list of arcane scientific terms includes "sodium
street-light" and "sisal" (this last is a fibre used to make rope); "A Note
on Metal" is misleadingly characterized. And I tend to shy away from
reviewerese like the sentence saying Prynne is "composing in a poetic
language that magisterially fuses the colloquial and the erudite, fully one
of our times." -- I could pick away at particular assertions & readings I
don't agree with (e.g. the flattening out of the phrase "just bearing" in
_N-Y_ into a narrative of victimhood) but that seems perhaps a little
pointless to me: I'd guess that what I'd see as incoherences or mistakes
are most likely mere artifacts of the difficulty of shovelling the book
into a review. I like the piece for not being _cagey_.
Small correction to my last note: it's _The Liberties_ not _The White
Wish_, of course--the latter's just one section of the whole chapbook. --N
Nate & Jane Dorward
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