Pomes Penyeach by James Joyce. San Francisco. 1927. Pirated From Shakespeare & Company Edition. unpaginated. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Pomes Penyeach is a collection of thirteen short poems written by James Joyce. Pomes Penyeach was written over a twenty-year period from 1904 to 1924 and originally published on 7 July 1927 by Shakespeare and Co. for the price of one shilling (twelve pennies) or twelve francs. The title is a play on ‘poems' and ‘pommes' (the French word for apples) which are here offered at ‘a penny each' in either currency. It was the custom for Irish tradespeople of the time to offer their customers a ‘tilly' (in Irish, tuilleadh) or extra serving - just as English bakers had developed the tradition of the ‘Baker's dozen‘, offering thirteen loaves instead of twelve. The first poem of Pomes Penyeach is entitled ‘Tilly' and represents the bonus offering of this penny-a-poem collection. (The poem was originally entitled ‘Cabra‘, after the district of Dublin where Joyce was living at the time of his mother's death.) The poems were initially rejected for publication by Ezra Pound. Although paid scant attention on its initial publication, this slender volume (the collection contains fewer than 1000 words in total) has proven surprisingly durable, and a number of its poems (particularly ‘Tilly', ‘A flower given to my daughter', ‘On the beach at Fontana', and ‘Bahnhofstrasse') continue to appear in anthologies to this day. ‘Pomes Penyeach' contains a number of Joycean neologisms (‘rosefrail', ‘moongrey' and ‘sindark', for example) created by melding two words into a new compound. The word ‘love' appears thirteen times in this collection of thirteen short poems (and the word ‘heart' appears almost as frequently) in a variety of contexts. Sometimes romantic love is intended, in tones that vary from sentimental or nostalgic (‘O sighing grasses,/ Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn!') to scathing (‘They mouth love's language. Gnash/ The thirteen teeth/ Your lean jaws grin with'). Yet at its best Joyce's poetry achieves, like his prose, a sense of vitality and loving compassion. (‘From whining wind and colder/ Grey sea I wrap him warm/ And touch his trembling fineboned shoulder/ And boyish arm. // Around us fear, descending/ Darkness of fear above/ And in my heart how deep unending/ Ache of love!')
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he perfected. Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland, on February 2, 1882. He was the oldest of ten children in a family that experienced increasing financial difficulties during his childhood. After attending Clongowes Wood College and Belevedere College (both Jesuit institutions) in Dublin, he entered the Royal University, where he studied languages and philosophy. Upon his graduation, in 1902, Joyce left Ireland for France but returned the following year because his mother was dying. In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle (they fell in love on June 16, ‘Bloomsday’), and in October of that year they went together to Europe, settling in Trieste. In 1909 and again in 1912 Joyce made unsuccessful attempts to publish Dubliners, a collection of fifteen stories that he intended to be ‘a chapter of the moral history of my country focused on Dublin, ‘the centre of paralysis.’ In 1914 Dubliners finally appeared, followed by the semiautobiographical novel A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, a reworking of an earlier manuscript, STEPHEN HERO. During the First World War Joyce and Nora lived in Zurich; in 1920 they moved to Paris, where Ulysses was published in 1922. FINNEGANS WAKE, Joyce’s most radical and complex work, began appearing in installments in 1928 and was published in its entirety in 1939. After the German occupation of Paris, Joyce and Nora (who were married in 1931) moved to Zurich, where he died in January. His complete oeuvre includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters. Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce's fictional universe does not extend far beyond Dublin, and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there; Ulysses in particular is set with precision in the streets and alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of Ulysses he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, ‘For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.’ Keri Walsh is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Institute of Irish Studies at Fordham University in New York. She is the editor of James Joyce's Dubliners (2016) and The Letters of Sylvia Beach (2010). A. Nicholas Fargnoli lives in Rockville Centre, NY and is dean of the Division of Humanities at Molloy College. He is author and editor of several books and coeditor of Ulysses in Critical Perspective. Michael Patrick Gillespie lives in Miami, FL and is director of the Center for the Humanities in an Urban Environment at Florida International University. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including James Joyce and the Exilic Imagination.
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