J.H. Prynne: Poems 2016-2024

Covering the most productive period of J.H. Prynne's career, this new volume collects all of the recent poetry of Britain’s leading late Modernist poet. Prynne's 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), as well as 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.

J.H. Prynne is Britain's leading late Modernist poet. His first retrospective Poems (1982) was followed by three expanded editions from Bloodaxe, in 1999, 2005 and 2015, with Poems 2016-2024 following as a separate supplementary volume in 2024. Separate editions have also been published of two of his collections, The White Stones (1969) from New York Review Books in 2016, and The Oval Window (1983) from Bloodaxe in 2018. Poems 2016–2024 includes 36 texts, from Each to Each (2017) to Alembic Forest (2024), all previously only available in limited editions from small presses. Prynne's most productive decade has also seen the publication of prose works including Whitman and Truth (2022) and editions of his correspondence with Charles Olson (2017) and Douglas Oliver (2022). His two-volume Collected Prose is forthcoming from OUP (New York). Born in 1936, Prynne was Cambridge University’s most influential don in English studies since F.R. Leavis.

ISBN: 9781780376929
Format: Paperback
Pages: 752
Publisher: Bloodaxe
Published: September 13, 2024

J H Prynne’s work is difficult, but (unlike the work of many other difficult poets) it is not at all cryptic. There’s no sense of meaning being withheld or obscured; nothing cries out for elucidation. It doesn’t mean, in that sense, at all, and if instead of getting annoyed by it you allow yourself to be swept away, it is buffeting and exhilarating, not at all like any other poetry in the world.' – John Clegg, The Telegraph (Poetry Book of the Month)'Prynne’s determined craft of language connects our world of the Now with the world of our Past.' – Ian Brinton, Litter magazine, on Poems 2016–2024‘While one might have expected an update of Prynne’s already monumental Poems, the arrival of more than 700 pages of new work is a remarkable turn of events […] Here is a book to keep us busy for a very long time.’ – David Wheatley, The Guardian

'Without doubt the most formidable and accomplished poet in England today, a writer who has single-handedly changed the vocabulary of expression.' - Peter Ackroyd, The Times'Prynne presents a body of work of staggering audacity and authority such that the map of contemporary poetry already begins to look a little different.' – Roger Caldwell, TLS'This book is one of the most inventive, intelligently experimental collected poems of the century.’ - Adam Phillips, Observer‘Poems is a vast slab of a thing, but its luminous and unsettling poems richly repay the attention they demand.’ – David Wheatley, Guardian [on the third edition of Poems]‘The place to start with Prynne is The White Stones (1969), one of the great volumes of postwar British verse. Poem after poem of quick, light, original perception re-frames the world with extraordinary freshness.’ – Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times [on the third edition of Poems]'The longer I have stayed with these pieces, the more they have moved and haunted me; the more I have felt altered by having experienced them…Prynne is hard-going, off-putting, and much disliked by many more traditional writers; he is also, when one gets into him, so good that he changes the way you think and feel.’ – Robert Potts, Guardian (Books of the Year)‘Prynne is refractory yet astonishingly lucid. First poet of the world for some things.’ – John Kerrigan, Times Literary Supplement (Books of the Year 2015)