Poems: (1999) first edition - Softcover

Prynne, J. H.

4.41

124 ratings by Goodreads

9781852244927: Poems: (1999) first edition

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852244925 ISBN 13: 9781852244927

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 1999

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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 this edition of his Poems was first published in 1999, it was immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry. This edition was superseded by the 2005 expanded second edition including four later collections only previously available in limited editions, and that in turn by the 2015 third edition including another six.

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Review:

Conspicuously learned, even hermetic, lyrically dense and, at times, obscurantist, J.H. Prynne's Poemsis a difficult, strangely unnerving book. It not only presents the reader with a rare form of intellectual tourism; it also offers a textbook-clear lesson in the verbal trickiness and playful elegance of High Modernism. Deftly employing a range of reference-- scientific, economic, political and verbal registers, didactic, satirical, sardonic and sentimental--Prynne's collected poems reveal a complex extension of what normally passes for "pure" diction in poetry. Whether or not Prynne is trying to conceive of a poetry going beyond what can, or ought, to be meaningfully said, he treats words as ciphers of transfiguration, as steps on a journey characterised by scrupulous attentiveness. If these poems are neither transparent nor opaque, they are also determinedly elusive, always pointing to something else, beyond the consolations of communication: to peruse these poems in search of the grain of sand inside the pearl is to play by rules they refuse to abide (after all, poems are not onions to be pared away in transparent layers).While easily, and increasingly, seen as a questionable imitator of Ezra Pound, or Charles Olson, Prynne's poetic experiments are already at the limits of lyricism and of what passes for metaphor in contemporary Anglo-American poetry-limits to which we no longer need be enslaved. --David Marriott

Review:

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) *

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