On Violence in the Work of J.H. Prynne

"Matthew Hall has written a captivating book about the poetics of violence, about how violence operates within a poetic, about how a poetic communicates the effects wrought on it by violence. Whether explicitly trauma-related or engaging with a violence at once more subtle and elusive, Prynne’s poetry is shown by Hall to deny any singular definition of meaning, instead conceiving of texts as sites from which interpretations can be constantly created and recreated. This solicitation of continuous interpretive work, Hall’s study demonstrates compellingly, is a crucial gesture of Prynne’s poetics, which is purposefully construed as inassimilable within pre-established categories—critical just as social—and resistant toward paraphrase, formalisation, or systematisation."

"The complexity of how to bear witness to extreme violence, the question of how to represent an experience of a distant suffering other is a continual preoccupation within Prynne’s poetics. This concern is brilliantly articulated in Matthew Hall’s recent study On Violence in the Work of J. H. Prynne (2015), where Hall works closely with the text to show how they interrogate the sites of major trauma and catastrophe within modernity."

"The way that Hall is able to be close to the linguistic ‘constriction’ and ‘censorship’ that Prynne represents is really the outstanding mark of this book. The concept of ‘survivors keeping watch over the annihilated’ expounded in the first chapter carries throughout. It is through this kind of attestation that language and, indeed, scholarship can do ethical work. [...] The book advances several distinct and significant contributions to Prynne scholarship. Being on a dramatically under-read poet, the book benefits from Hall’s deep historiographical research and its resultant new theoretical concepts. [...] On Violence in the Work of J.H. Prynne is a valuable addition to what should be described as an invigorated moment in Australian poetic criticism. Taking on the transnational, decolonising, and ecopoetical sensitivities of this moment, Hall turns alertly to a powerful poetic, and perhaps pioneering, proponent of this mode."

"Prynne’s ambition was ‘to establish relations not personally with the reader, but with the world and its layers of shifted but recognizable usage’. Matthew Hall’s first monograph, On Violence in the Work of J.H. Prynne, begins with this quotation (p. 1), and immediately moves into an extended chapter on Prynne’s elegy for Paul Celan. [...] That chapter considers the poem’s movement from grief to consolation in a pastoral mode criss-crossed by images of bodily harm and social violence, attempting, in Hall’s words, ‘to render through language the horror facing Holocaust victims, rather than to represent and comment upon this horror’ (p. 18). That subtle distinction is characteristic of Hall’s sensitive and inventive mode of reading Prynne’s exceptionally challenging poetry. On Violence in the Work of J.H. Prynne is perhaps the most valuable single book yet written on Prynne’s work, and the one which makes best headway with the accelerating strangeness of late works such as Acylic Tips [2002] and Refuse Collection [2004]."