Poems 2016-2024

J.H. Prynne

As John Clegg has recently put it, '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.'

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. 

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.

Read a review of the book by Luke Roberts in the New Left Review's Sidecar here.