Poetry review – CONTINUOUS PRESENT: Kate Noakes admires D A Prince’s imaginative celebrations of the average and the ordinary
Continuous Present
D.A. Prince
New Walk Editions, 2025
ISBN 9781739281281
£7
D.A. Prince’s opening poem sets out her project in this new pamphlet – using a quote from Marianne Moore as her title ‘in my average moments,’ she explains that her search is ‘for the exceptional everywhere,’ ‘in the foxed mirror of today, inside the relentless weight of my own hours.’ OK then, so having thanked Moore and set out her stall, what does she go on to offer us?
I enjoyed the ordinariness of the circumstances Prince chooses to explore in this work. For example, settling on the bus to do some writing in “I’d Got My Notebook Out,” she is interrupted by a bore rambling on about a range of seemingly interesting and uninteresting things. By the end of the poem, something has shifted in her so that ‘pavement, asphalt, tarmac / aren’t the solid footings they were yesterday.’
Ordinary activities that prompt poems include making bread by hand (when the bread machine has broken) giving rise to a pleasingly evocative phrase ‘the slubbed-silk feel of flour’. There is also a celebration of weeds in guttering; a description of light through a church window creating ‘spirits of colour,/ free and abstract and liquid/ glowing with life’; and a look at the strange other life of dreams. Yet more examples are a gallery full of people looking at a Caravaggio; a consideration as to why Cezanne painted so many apples; a city made of all things apple; and going to the cinema in the afternoon.
“Routine appointment” relates to a trip to the hairdresser who is unwell and in which a conversation about illness is clipped by the business of a haircut and resolves itself into the ordinary: ‘And yes, her dog’s OK. We’re good/ at surfaces, at hearts, the brighter side.’
“Second Life” amuses with its scenario of the perfection of the old online game world and a couple whose avatars cheat. The fantasy descriptions of such a life are enjoyable compared to the reality of a dog needing a walk and everything smelling of Pedigree Chum. Equally inventive is “The Alibi Cupboard,” where you’ll find ‘a family of homework-eating dogs. [and] / Your grandmother’s ten funerals, every one,/ stacked in the corner, being brave.’ Again Prince dresses seriousness in the comic.
The world of the dead and memorials features too in poems such as “Shades,” a sonnet where slouching ghosts may or may not exist ‘on that boundary/ between the unknown and all you ever wanted’. “Butterflies” is a tender in memoriam. And “Making New” is a kind of elegy, in this case commemorating vintage radios.
These are precise lyrics with not a word out of place. Prince is a consummate poet with keen observational skills and formal dexterity. This is a pamphlet to savour after a busy day, a place to relish the quotidian.
Nov 1 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – D A Prince
Poetry review – CONTINUOUS PRESENT: Kate Noakes admires D A Prince’s imaginative celebrations of the average and the ordinary
D.A. Prince’s opening poem sets out her project in this new pamphlet – using a quote from Marianne Moore as her title ‘in my average moments,’ she explains that her search is ‘for the exceptional everywhere,’ ‘in the foxed mirror of today, inside the relentless weight of my own hours.’ OK then, so having thanked Moore and set out her stall, what does she go on to offer us?
I enjoyed the ordinariness of the circumstances Prince chooses to explore in this work. For example, settling on the bus to do some writing in “I’d Got My Notebook Out,” she is interrupted by a bore rambling on about a range of seemingly interesting and uninteresting things. By the end of the poem, something has shifted in her so that ‘pavement, asphalt, tarmac / aren’t the solid footings they were yesterday.’
Ordinary activities that prompt poems include making bread by hand (when the bread machine has broken) giving rise to a pleasingly evocative phrase ‘the slubbed-silk feel of flour’. There is also a celebration of weeds in guttering; a description of light through a church window creating ‘spirits of colour,/ free and abstract and liquid/ glowing with life’; and a look at the strange other life of dreams. Yet more examples are a gallery full of people looking at a Caravaggio; a consideration as to why Cezanne painted so many apples; a city made of all things apple; and going to the cinema in the afternoon.
“Routine appointment” relates to a trip to the hairdresser who is unwell and in which a conversation about illness is clipped by the business of a haircut and resolves itself into the ordinary: ‘And yes, her dog’s OK. We’re good/ at surfaces, at hearts, the brighter side.’
“Second Life” amuses with its scenario of the perfection of the old online game world and a couple whose avatars cheat. The fantasy descriptions of such a life are enjoyable compared to the reality of a dog needing a walk and everything smelling of Pedigree Chum. Equally inventive is “The Alibi Cupboard,” where you’ll find ‘a family of homework-eating dogs. [and] / Your grandmother’s ten funerals, every one,/ stacked in the corner, being brave.’ Again Prince dresses seriousness in the comic.
The world of the dead and memorials features too in poems such as “Shades,” a sonnet where slouching ghosts may or may not exist ‘on that boundary/ between the unknown and all you ever wanted’. “Butterflies” is a tender in memoriam. And “Making New” is a kind of elegy, in this case commemorating vintage radios.
These are precise lyrics with not a word out of place. Prince is a consummate poet with keen observational skills and formal dexterity. This is a pamphlet to savour after a busy day, a place to relish the quotidian.