Prynne, J. H.: Poems 2016-2024

Description

Bloodaxe Books, paperback

Publication Date: September 3rd, 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 hisPoemswas first published in 1999, it was immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry. Four further collections were added to the second edition ofPoemsin 2005, followed by a further seven along with a group of uncollected poems to the third edition ofPoems(2015).

The decade sincePoems(2015) has been 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 ofPoemswould have more than doubled the size of that volume.Poems 2016-2024is therefore a separate, supplementary edition of his later work, including, except for minor corrections, the mostly unchanged contents of 36 texts written sincePoems(2015), fromEach to Each(2017) toAlembic Forest(2024), as well as the corrected 2023 text ofAt Raucous Purposeful(2022). The 26ImpromptuscomprisingMemory Working, originally published by Face Press in three separate editions in 2020 and 2021, appear here as a complete sequence.