J.H. Prynne (1936-2026) was Britain's leading late Modernist poet. HisPoems(1982) collected all the work he wanted to keep in print up to that point, beginning withKitchen Poems(1968). An expanded and updated version was published by Bloodaxe Books with Fremantle Arts Centre Press in 1999 asPoems. Four further collections were added to the second edition ofPoemsin 2005, followed by a further seven along with a group of uncollected poems to the third edition ofPoems(2015).
The decade followingPoems(2015) was the most productive period of Prynne's life, with over thirty limited editions published between 2017 and 2023. To have added these to a fourth edition ofPoemswould have doubled the size of that volume. HisPoems 20162024was therefore a separate, supplementary edition of his later work, including, except for minor corrections, the unchanged contents of 34 texts, fromEach to Each(2017), written in 2016, toHadn't Yet Bitten(2023), as well as the corrected 2023 text ofAt Raucous Purposeful(2022). His later work was published by Face Press in four further pamphlets:From Obsidian Cobalt(2024),Doric Plumage(2025),Which Scarf Match(2026) andSingle Tangle Mine(2026).
Prynne published a wide range of critical and academic prose, including works on Saussure, Wordsworth, Shakespeare. His essay onNew Songs from a Jade Terrace, an anthology of early Chinese love poetry, was included in the second edition of the book from Penguin in 1982. He also wrote poetry in classical Chinese under the name Pu Ling-en. His 1969 collectionThe White Stones central to his poetics was reissued in 2016 by New York Review Books with an introduction by Peter Gizzi. An annotated, illustrated edition of his 1983 collectionThe Oval Window, edited by N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018.
Prynne's most productive decade also saw the publication of three prose works,Graft and Corruption: Shakespeare's Sonnet 15(2015/2016),Apophthegms(2017) andWhitman and Truth(2022), along with editions of Prynne's correspondence with Charles Olson (2017) and Douglas Oliver (2022). His two-volumeCollected Proseis forthcoming from Oxford University Press (New York). A seminal interview with Jeff Doven and Joshua Kotin, 'J.H. Prynne: The Arts of Poetry No.101', was published inParis Review, 218 (Fall 2016).
Jeremy Halvard Prynne grew up in Kent and studied at St Dunstan's College in Catford and Jesus College, Cambridge. He was a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 2005 he retired from teaching English Literature as a Lecturer and from his posts as University Reader in English Poetry for the University of Cambridge and Director of Studies in English for Gonville and Caius College; he retired as Librarian of the College in 2006.
'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. '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). 'This book is one of the most inventive, intelligently experimental collected poems of the century' - Adam Phillips, Observer.
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