J.H. Prynne

J.H. Prynne is Britain’s leading late Modernist poet. His austere yet playful poetry challenges our sense of the world, not by any direct address to the reader but by showing everything in a different light, enacting slips and changes of meaning through shifting language. Not since the late work of Ezra Pound and the Maximus series of Charles Olson have the possibilities of poetry been so fundamentally questioned and extended as they are in the life work of J.H. Prynne. When his Poems was first published in 1999, it was immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry. Four further collections were added to the second edition of Poems in 2005, followed by a further seven along with a group of uncollected poems to the third edition of Poems (2015). The decade since Poems (2015) has been the most productive period of Prynne's life, with over thirty limited editions published between 2017 and 2024. To have added these to a fourth edition of Poems would have more than doubled the size of that volume. Poems 2016–2024 is therefore a separate, supplementary edition of his later work, including, except for minor corrections, the mostly unchanged contents of 36 texts written since Poems (2015), from Each to Each (2017) to Alembic Forest (2024), including the corrected 2023 text of At Raucous Purposeful (2022). The 26 Impromptus comprising Memory Working, originally published by Face Press in three separate editions in 2020 and 2021, appear here as a complete sequence. Prynne's most productive decade has also seen the publication of three prose works, Graft and Corruption: Shakespeare's Sonnet 15 (2015/2016), Apophthegms (2017) and Whitman and Truth (2022), along with editions of Prynne's correspondence with Charles Olson (2017) and Douglas Oliver (2022). His two-volume Collected Prose is forthcoming from Oxford University Press (New York).

J.H. Prynne is Britain’s leading late Modernist poet. His austere yet playful poetry challenges our sense of the world, not by any direct address to the reader but by showing everything in a different light, enacting slips and changes of meaning through shifting language. Not since the late work of Ezra Pound and the Maximus series of Charles Olson have the possibilities of poetry been so fundamentally questioned and extended as they are in the life work of J.H. Prynne. When his Poems was first published in 1999, it was immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry. Four further collections were added to the second edition of Poems in 2005, followed by a further seven along with a group of uncollected poems to the third edition of Poems (2015). The decade since Poems (2015) has been the most productive period of Prynne's life, with over thirty limited editions published between 2017 and 2024. To have added these to a fourth edition of Poems would have more than doubled the size of that volume. Poems 2016–2024 is therefore a separate, supplementary edition of his later work, including, except for minor corrections, the mostly unchanged contents of 36 texts written since Poems (2015), from Each to Each (2017) to Alembic Forest (2024), including the corrected 2023 text of At Raucous Purposeful (2022). The 26 Impromptus comprising Memory Working, originally published by Face Press in three separate editions in 2020 and 2021, appear here as a complete sequence. Prynne's most productive decade has also seen the publication of three prose works, Graft and Corruption: Shakespeare's Sonnet 15 (2015/2016), Apophthegms (2017) and Whitman and Truth (2022), along with editions of Prynne's correspondence with Charles Olson (2017) and Douglas Oliver (2022). His two-volume Collected Prose is forthcoming from Oxford University Press (New York).

Whitman and Truth is a set of reading notes intended to introduce third-year university students to Whitman's reading of war, with enlightening comparisons offered from the work Susan Sontag, Sir Philip Sidney, Mo Yan, Edmund Blunden, and others.

At Raucous Purposeful is a text-sequence in ten parallel prose exploits by the one and only J. H. Prynne. An intriguing work of fascinating association and diversion with nervous danger potential alongside the absurd enduring whole.

This book brings together three interconnected works from the 1970s, showcasing how three of the most significant figures in radical British poetry of the late 20th century responded to one another's work.

This most recent experiment with words on the page continues the duet-passage between J.H. Prynne and the possibilities of lyrical transformation, subsequent eventually to Poems (Bloodaxe, 2015).

This volume is a new annotated edition of J.H. Prynne's 1983 poem The Oval Window, making use of photographs taken by the poet at the time and place of composition, together with a substantial portfolio supplied by him of source and reference material. This source material includes political and economic news published during the period in early autumn 1983 when the poem was written, together with extracts from literature, Eastern and Western philosophy, optics, anatomy, computer programming language, and a considerable quantity of ancient Chinese poetry. The edition has two commentary essays: the first primarily concerned with approaches to reading, including the use of search engines, and with the relations between different elements in the work, and the second with the topography and the critical antecedents of the poem. For ease of reading, a clean reading text is included as well as the annotated text. The expanded third edition of Prynne's Poems (2015) was published by Bloodaxe in 2015.

J. H. Prynne is Britain's leading late-modernist poet. His work, as it has emerged since the 1960s, when he was close to Charles Olson and Edward Dorn, is marked by a remarkable combination of lyricism and abstraction, at once austere and playful. The White Stones is a book that is central to Prynne's career and poetics, and it constitutes an ideal introduction to the achievement and vision of a legendary but in America still little-known contemporary master.

This volume contains the remarkable PhD thesis submitted by Crozier in 1972, and for which his external examiner was J.H. Prynne-whose comments on the thesis are also included here, as an afterword. "My intention in writing this thesis has been to cast some light on the prima facie case that free verse, in abandoning the exercise of metre, has abandoned that principle of restraint upon which the creation of artistic form depends. This point of view contrasts with a general contention on the part of the exponents of free verse that their works possess form which is not only unique but which also bears an immediate relation to the significance of the work, a relationship felt to be 'musical', although not in any directly analogical sense."

J.H. Prynne is Britain's leading late Modernist poet. His austere yet playful poetry challenges our sense of the world, not by any direct address to the reader but by showing everything in a different light, enacting slips and changes of meaning through shifting language. Not since the late work of Ezra Pound and the Maximus series of Charles Olson have the possibilities of poetry been so fundamentally questioned and extended as they are in the life work of J.H. Prynne. When his Poems was first published in 1999, it was immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry. Four further collections were added to the second edition of Poems in 2005. This expanded third edition of Poems (2015) includes the complete texts of his later work: Refuse Collection (2004), To Pollen (2006), STREAK~~~WILLING~~~ENTOURAGE~~~ARTESIAN (2009), Sub Songs (2010), Kazoo Dreamboats; or, On What There Is (2011), and Al-Dente (2014), all previously available only in limited editions.