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 35 texts, from Each to Each (2017) to Foremost Wayleave (2023), 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.