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2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Brilliant! Sep 10, 2008
Dark dreamscapes juxtaposed upon the mean streets of devolved and degenerated New York City and western civilization, such as its vestigial remains are today. Mr Pryce is a genius in the genre, and had he been living in his proper sphere he would be renowned from here to Irkalla!
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
New Ezra Pound Jun 20, 2008
Writing (or even reading) poetry is almost as good as praying; not in vain, the most important figures of the Bible were poets from King David of Psalms to the Prophets. Joe Pryce, a New York poet, wanted to become a priest, but after a few years trying, he reverted to music and poetry. It is good to read his poems, revealing a man of immense erudition and still, a simple soul. What sort of poet is Pryce? There is always a Marilyn Monroe, a blonde goddess on the cinematic Olympus, wrote Gore Vidal in his Myra Breckenridge. Likewise, there is or there should be an Ezra Pound at Parnassus, and Joe Pryce is an Ezra Pound of our days. His new book, Mansions of Irkalla, should find a place at your bookshelf next to the Personae of Pound.
The title is taken from the Babylonian epic, where Irkalla appears to be a quite unpleasant and gloomy place . It is usually night in the Mansions of Irkalla. Pryce depicts the contours and colors of gloomy and mysterious nightscape, whose topography and atmosphere are embodied in New York, for Pryce is a New Yorker born and bred:
Ghostly lemon lamps lure feeble flocks down
Fog-enchained Fifth Avenue
Or:
As I wandered in a haze
Down Broadway in
The chilling rain...
We may explore the dark recesses and disturbing depths of Irkalla, where overmastering night's shadow worlds are captured and elegantly phrased in verse that announces the arrival of a new voice in modern English poetry. But there is no poet without apprenticeship. His supreme teachers are Pound and T.S. Eliot, who wanted "a modernism that brought back to life the highest standards of the past", and Pryce is well acquainted with these standards. His immediate masters are the French Parnassians and the German Expressionists whose poems he translated profusely, as translation is a usual and maybe best apprenticeship.
Some of his poems strongly remind us of Constantine Cavafy:
Too restless for monastic usages,
Our prince embarks upon his cryptic Quest...
The withered wizards warned him of mischance,
Of fiends who feast upon the flesh of man,
But what man worthy of the name would heed them?
His imagery is powerful and unexpected. Thus, he says of Nietzsche:
Viking of the Psyche
Limp on,
Mad moralist with cloven hoof
But, as every poet, he writes of love. This poem is an oath of eternal love to his aging mistress:
OF THE CHIAROSCURO:
Your hair is a luminous tempest of serpents:
Delighting, entrancing, then dooming
Your lovers to endless and dream-freighted sleep.
O your eyes are an ominous, death-dealing green,
A dragon-choked jungle at twilight
Where all things betray and bemuse.
O Byzantine Empress, my lust and my love,
When red roses have withered and laughter is done
Remember one lover whose blazon is loyalty
Should you become quite, quite pathetic
One who is now what he has been
Will remain, alas, what he is now,
Your servant, Ma'am.
Tom Sunic wrote of Joe Pryce:
In this important book of poems, a thinker, a poet and a New Yorker, 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. (TS)
Joe Pryce about himself:
I was born in Brooklyn and I studied for the Roman Catholic priesthood for three years (Redemptorist Order) and I then attended Brooklyn College. I was a musician for many years and recorded several CDs, but literature has always been my first love (especially poetry). I've translated the works of German philosopher Ludwig Klages and these are posted at two sites on the web. I live with my wife, 30,000 books, and a dog and four cats in Rononkoma Long Island, New York. My favorite writer is Edgar Poe and I am currently working on my second volume of verse.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Decadence and Darkness in 2008! Finally... Apr 07, 2008
A resurrection of gothic poetry could not have come at a better time. When you think all is lost, it is here in the wild imagination of author J. Pryce. This is a modern masterpiece.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
Extraordinary new poet Apr 04, 2008
Mansions of Irkalla is a startling collection of new poems, translations from German and French poets, and witty haikus that reveal a Gothic and sinister atmosphere of nightscapes and cityscapes, whose gloom and intensity will be overpowering to the lover of poetry on the dark side of life.
Exquisitely crafted and intensely felt, Mansions of Irkalla reveals Mr. Pryce as an exciting new poet at the height of his literary form.
If you love Poe and Baudelaire, you will love Mansions of Irkalla.
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