Additional information
by J. H. Prynne (Author)
J.H. Prynne (1936-2026) was 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 had the possibilities of poetry been so fundamentally questioned and extended as they were 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) was 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 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), written in 2016, to Alembic Forest (2024), including the corrected 2023 text of At Raucous Purposeful (2022). The 26 Impromptus comprising Memory Working, originally published in three separate editions in 2020 and 2021, appear here as a complete sequence.
Prynne's most productive decade also saw 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).
Author Biography
J.H. Prynne (1936-2026) was Britain's leading late Modernist poet. His Poems (1982) collected all the work he wanted to keep in print up to that point, beginning with Kitchen Poems (1968). An expanded and updated version was published by Bloodaxe Books with Fremantle Arts Centre Press in 1999 as Poems. 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 following Poems (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 of Poems would have doubled the size of that volume. His Poems 2016-2024 was therefore 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). His later work was published by Face Press in four further pamphlets: From Obsidian Cobalt (2024), Doric Plumage (2025), Which Scarf Match (2026) and Single Tangle Mine (2026).
Prynne published a wide range of critical and academic prose, including works on Saussure, Wordsworth, Shakespeare. His essay on New 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 collection The 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 collection The 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) 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). A seminal interview with Jeff Doven and Joshua Kotin, 'J.H. Prynne: The Arts of Poetry No.101', was published in Paris 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.
