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. This expanded third edition of Poems (2015) includes the complete texts of his later work: Refuse Collection (2004), To Pollen (2006), STREAK~~~WILLING~~~ENTOURAGE~~~ARTESIAN (2009), Sub Songs (2010), Kazoo Dreamboats; or, On What There Is (2011), and Al-Dente (2014), all previously available only in limited editions.

Publisher Review

'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.