The poetry of JD Pryce

Tom Sunic circulated an alert today to the appearance of a fresh volume of some 89 poems by Joe Pryce, titled The Mansions of Irkalla.  Pryce, a New Yorker, is a poet of the Promethean spirit, that long reclusive self of the mythic European past.

Tom wrote:-

In this important book of poems, Joe D. Pryce revives the traditions of 19th century verse of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire. Very much in the footsteps of the French symbolists, he depicts the horrors of the modern liberal system, thus adding his own poetic flavor to the cultural-political arsenal of modern conservative-revolutionary thought. His poems are an attempt to resuscitate American poetry and to realign it with a Euro-American giant, Ezra Pound. His unsurpassed sense of the English language, teeming with surreal metaphors and strange antediluvian imagery, guides the reader to that primordial quest for the meaning of time and being. Pryce’s poems are an invaluable contribution to the heritage of European Prometheism, which has lain dormant since World War II.

I thought I should reproduce a couple of Pryce poems.  They predate the new collection, but illustrate well what Tom is getting at.

Maidens & Guardians
We sing our lays
Of distant days
Of honeyed springtimes
In an Age of Gold.

But we the warriors work on in shadowy remoteness
Recollecting tragedy whilst forging treasures of the spirit
In a pensive pondering, anigh the maidens caroling
Through noontide’s mellow and yet vibrant gleaming
For an awesome advent is approaching
Gathering its might upon the heavy wings of autumn.

Still this dithyrambic choir of maidens,
Is rehearsing, warbling, for its festival.

An elaborately interwoven and precisely draughted world
Of slow and sweet decline
Its palette slightly muted as to color
Seems in our eyes slowly now to dim
And languish, as if knowing that
These sweet chansons accompany
Their dark avengers
As we forge our racks
And craft our fearsome Iron Maidens.

Sad, yet richly apprehensive
Of the wondrous wizardry of the declining,
Meltingly alluring world advancing ineluctably upon us.

More than merely Autumn slithers up the steep declivity, and so,
We now go off to deal out savage preludes
To unspeakable massacres beyond which we must
Deal out condign pain to many more who sha’n't tell aught of it.
For now is the bright hour of our returning come among us:
And we all are ready.

Ice Mountains

She has dwelt upon icebergs, a princess of ice;
Has communed with the owl’s golden glance,
With the vixen who gambols in tossed iv’ry powder.

Her eye turns again to the dull, yellow sun,
And her ear to the ominous sounds
Of the groaning and cracking, the grinding, slow progress
Of rock-speckled glaciers that pause in their torpid glissandi.
And soon, she assumes, they’ll begin their retreat
As the hot waves of darkness pour forth
From the maw of the world to dissolve
Her blithe kingdom of crystalline beauty.

Will the snows on the rivers of ice start to melt?
Will the royal blue hearts start to shimmer, huge gems,
In the silence of gray afternoons?
Now the dimming-down light laves, in soft-pink and mauve,
The long, skeletal fingers of ice pointing down to the valley
Which soon will reclaim the sharp stones of her dwelling,
Ensheathing a shrine in the Northland’s chill fleece.
Once the black, ageless spurs of the mountains
Gazed out to observe the clear, wide mountain lakes,
Ringed with shifting Saharas of blown alabaster;
But mercury rises and drops turn to torrents
As signals conflict in the ominous skies.
Now the musk-ox, dressed up
In the uncertain ice as a garment,
Disposes his thick-layered girth on the ground
With a strange, nascent doubt in his piteous eyes.
Does the Ice Princess know
That the evergreen, hunched from the blast,
Soon will shiver and shudder apart in its torment,
Ere invading bright hordes, 
Born of liquified flame, rip the mantle of earth?
She is gone…...
                .......to a dappled, far forest.
A damp, cool, monastical dwelling will shelter the Princess
Until the grave days, when a voice sighs up high in the winds,
And her glistening body, as pale
As the white Arctic hare she’s abandoned,
Looms up as a warrior,
Naked to soon-yielding worlds.

Now she drifts near and nearer to slumber’s dim realm,
Where the wind-whooshing rustle of rushes
Sighs in through the soft-closing shutters of dream.
In a close-clustered world drenched in emerald green
She dissolves in the sheltering arms of the Goddess,
Who murmurs in deep, plangent tones to her:
“You are the one, my child; you are the one!
Bring it down, bring it down into fleet, hot destruction.
Let ashes remain of the world of the soulless;
Let ashes blow far on the winds you’ll unleash
Past the bloody horizon’s far verge.”

Now is the seal on her brow as she touches,
With tips of her long, lissome fingers,
The waters which cleanse from the fume and the filth
Of an age given over to Thanatos,
World torn apart by the far-raging minions of Will.

And the face and the frame of her, burning straight up
From the depths of the gloom, now are readied for deeds;
And she knows that with Mystery’s moon-granted
Shadow for paramour, now is she armored for combat,
And far will her high-arching footsteps descend,
Very far will her deep, witching eyes lure her armies.

She glides from her gloaming; her glance is ablaze
As the wafer-thin shield of the snow-dusted ice
On her pine-girdled pond falls asunder,
And birds of ill-omen on jetty-black wings
Swoop and scream in electrified air.
And it’s now in the mayhem outside her sweet cloister
That swirling, delirious, samite-clad girls ring the altars,
To dance there with Maenadic frenzy around spewing fire—
All but one who stares joyously up at the red, smoking heart
Which the priestess commands her
To hurl from the brand to the sky-licking flames.

Then the Night-Crusade roars down the road,
On the gleaming, lithe limbs of the maidens,
To monstrously bloated metropoleis sleeping,
Now sleeping their very last sleep;
For the salt sows the furrows tomorrow.
And there will be time and enough for the tears
Of remembrance when footprints
Appear in the snows once again
At the craggy white roof of the world,
At the dawn of an Age.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, June 5, 2008 at 10:54 AM in Books
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