J. H. Prynne – författare

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.

This most recent experiment with words on the page continues the duet-passage between J.H. Prynne and the possibilities of lyrical transformation, subsequent eventually to Poems (Bloodaxe, 2015).

In 1975 J.H. Prynne published High Pink on Chrome. The publication was to be avidly devoured by his admirers and fellow poets. Prynne's example loomed large, especially in Cambridge, and John James and Andrew Crozier would both often respond to his work. Later in 1975, John James published Striking the Pavilion of Zero, which references Prynne, and then, three years later, Andrew Crozier published High Zero, the title of which references, and responds to, both of the preceding books - in this case, the connection goes even further, with the first poem in the book being based on the final poem in Prynne's collection, and the last poem being based on the first poem in the James collection.This unusual compendium volume gives readers a chance to look in on this cardinal moment in radical English poetry, and see the connections at work. The sequences can be read in the various collected editions of the three poets, but the limited-edition originals are long out of print. Here the poems are presented together and afresh in the original context of their first grace and audacity.