Full Description
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).
Contents
Each to Each (2017) 9
OF · THE · ABYSS (2017) 23
Or Scissel (2018) 35
Of Better Scrap (2019) 67
None Yet More Willing Told (2019) 143
Parkland (2019) 161
Bitter Honey (2020) 195
Squeezed White Noise (2020) 207
Enchanter's Nightshade (2020) 251
Memory Working: Impromptus I-XXVI (2020-21) 269
Her Air Fallen (2020) 297
The Fever's End (2020) 305
Passing Grass Parnassus (2020) 329
Aquatic Hocquets (2020) 355
Kernels in Vernal Silence (2020) 373
Torrid Auspicious Quartz (2020) 383
See By So (2020) 395
Duets Infer Duty (2020) 399
Orchard (2020) 411
Otherhood Imminent Profusion (2021) 417
Presume Catkins (2021) 427
Athwart Apron Snaps (2021) 435
Efflux Reference (2021) 443
Dune Quail Eggs (2021) 455
Lay Them Straight (2021) 459
Shade Furnace (2021) 465
Snooty Tipoffs (2021) 477
Sea Shells Told (2022) 543
At Raucous Purposeful (2022/2023) 551
Latency of the Conditional (2023) 571
Not Ice Novice (2022) 585
At the Monument (2022) 593
Foremost Wayleave (2023) 631
Hadn't Yet Bitten (2023) 653
Timepiece in Total (2024) 679
Alembic Forest (2024) 695
Bibliography 713
Index of Titles or First Lines 715
