Poems 2016-2024

J.H. Prynne is Britain's leading late Modernist poet. His Poems (1982) collected all the work he wanted to keep in print, 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).Prynne has 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 has written 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.The decade since Poems (2015) has been 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 – published in June 2024 – is therefore a separate, supplementary edition of his later work, including, except for minor corrections, the mostly unchanged contents of 36 texts, from Each to Each (2017) to Alembic Forest (2024), as well as the corrected 2023 text of At Raucous Purposeful (2022).Prynne's most productive decade has also seen 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).Born in 1936, Prynne is a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 2005 he retired from his posts teaching English Literature as a Lecturer and University Reader in English Poetry for the University of Cambridge and as Director of Studies in English for Gonville and Caius College; he retired as Librarian of the College in 2006.

J.H. Prynne’s Poems is a collection, thirty years in the making, in which the language is both astonishing and inevitable. Such a level of intelligence, control and risk is shocking.

• Each to Each (2017) 9OF · THE · ABYSS (2017) 23Or Scissel (2018) 35Of Better Scrap (2019) 67None Yet More Willing Told (2019) 143Parkland (2019) 161Bitter Honey (2020) 195Squeezed White Noise (2020) 207Enchanter’s Nightshade (2020) 251Memory Working: Impromptus I-XXVI (2020-21) 269Her Air Fallen (2020) 297The Fever’s End (2020) 305Passing Grass Parnassus (2020) 329Aquatic Hocquets (2020) 355Kernels in Vernal Silence (2020) 373Torrid Auspicious Quartz (2020) 383See By So (2020) 395Duets Infer Duty (2020) 399Orchard (2020) 411Otherhood Imminent Profusion (2021) 417Presume Catkins (2021) 427Athwart Apron Snaps (2021) 435Efflux Reference (2021) 443Dune Quail Eggs (2021) 455Lay Them Straight (2021) 459Shade Furnace (2021) 465Snooty Tipoffs (2021) 477Sea Shells Told (2022) 543At Raucous Purposeful (2022/2023) 551Latency of the Conditional (2023) 571Not Ice Novice (2022) 585At the Monument (2022)593Foremost Wayleave (2023)631Hadn’t Yet Bitten (2023)653Timepiece in Total (2024)679Alembic Forest (2024)695Bibliography713Index of Titles or First Lines715