Prynne, J. H.: Poems 2016-2024 (HB)

Bloodaxe Books, hardcover

Publication Date: September 3, 2024

Publisher Marketing: 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). In the decade since Poems (2015), Prynne has published over thirty limited editions, all of which are collected in Poems 2016-2024; a separate, supplementary edition of his later work, including, except for minor corrections, the unchanged contents of 34 texts, from Each to Each (2017), written in 2016, to Hadn't Yet Bitten (2023), 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.