As Bloodaxe, the publisher of J.H. Prynne’s Poems (1999), notes, the gathering of three decades of Prynne’s verse into one 400-page volume was “immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry”, and widely reviewed. Since then, however, there has much more intellectually oblique, linguistically dense poetry by Prynne, all published in his preferred format of small-press editions more easily available by post than in bookshops. This has led to two further expanded editions, with the last, in 2015, pushing 700 pages. But the number of reviews each time has notably declined.
Now, there has been so much more new poetry from Prynne that it has split off, like a calving glacier, into a 700-page “supplementary volume”, Poems 2016—2024. What to do with such a block of a book? My feeling is that it can’t readily be reviewed, in the conventional sense of a succinct evaluative summary, written in response to a cover-to-cover reading: this is not one sequence of linguistically dense poems, but many.
As the poet Michael Haslam once wisely observed, “after an initial bafflement” new sequences by Prynne “should be put on a shelf to mature for a couple of years, after which they become, mysteriously, more accessible.” But even other people who like Prynne — who write like Prynne — have admitted to me that they haven’t kept up with the recent overdrive in production. One deterrent is cost: many of these pamphlets are beautifully printed, but with postage cost more than a tenner a time. So on that measure at least, £25 (paperback) / £35 (hardback) for the 36 sequences in Poems 2016—2024 is a welcome end to Prynnflation.
But why indulge so much writing that is so hard to read? My answer would be that, after “initial bafflement”, I have enjoyed Prynne’s poetry deeply in the past — enough to keep me tuning in to the new work, which is in many ways different in style(s), though with the same ambition to see how much of the world might be held in words (Prynne is interested in everything). I wrote a little about these pleasures last year:
Now, as one of the critics quoted on the dustjacket of the new Poems encouraging people to read it, I feel under some obligation to respond to its appearance. And my tentative experimental alternative to a review is a rolling set of reading notes, which I am going to begin below.
First though, for anyone wanting a warm-up, here’s a slightly revised version of my review of the third edition of Prynne’s Poems (2015) for the Sunday Times:
There is something admirably old-fashioned about the avant-garde poet JH Prynne. Last year, YouTube footage showed this retired Cambridge don in a Chinese TV studio reading Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners”, a supernatural ballad that was once a schoolroom favourite.
The storytelling de la Mare seems the last poet one would associate with Prynne, whose reputation for obscurity precedes him like a peasouper fog in this country. But the juxtaposition is illuminating. Both poets charm by the suggestiveness of their words (T.S. Eliot praised de la Mare’s poetry for its “inexplicable mystery of sound”). However bewildering a Prynne poem may be, it resonates long after reading, like the ghostly “silence [that] surged softly backward” at the end of “The Listeners”.
Not all of this hefty collected poems charms. I have been reading Prynne’s work since the late Nineties, and there are still pages that feel like slabs of inked concrete. But there are also phrases and images so luminous and memorable that they have become a way of seeing the world.
The place to start with Prynne is The White Stones (1969), one of the great volumes of post-war British verse, which was republished by NYRB Books in 2016. Poem after poem of quick, light, original perception reframes the world with extraordinary freshness. Prynne’s theme — humanity’s place in the universe — is as high as the 1960s gets. But his eye and ear are close to the ground. “I can hear every smallest growth”, he writes, “down by / the sodium street-lights, in the head.”
Prynne’s early interest in science now looks prophetic: “The ice cap will / never melt / again why / should it”, asks one poem, in mock-disbelief at the notion of climate change. The most mind-expanding instance may be “The Glacial Question, Unsolved”, which reads like Four Quartets-era Eliot narrating a newsreel about the end of the ice age in Britain:
The sky cloudy
and the day packed into the crystal
as the thrust slowed and we come to
a stand, along the coast of Norfolk.
In the 1970s, Prynne ventured into even stranger territory. The 500 pages here from Brass (1971) onward are like nothing else in English poetry. Individual collections, first published as small-press chapbooks, obliquely register historical moods. Down Where Changed (1979) is the bitterly out-of-tune song of a consumerist society (“What… a fat lot / one bites one’s lip right through”); The Oval Window (1983) is a long poem on a computerised landscape which still has essentially pastoral needs; Triodes (1999) is a satirical, cartoon-like legend about war and neoliberal world order.
Some of the later sequences are, no doubt, industrially demanding. Kazoo Dreamboats (2011) is a verse essay containing every idea in this poet’s cosmos. It is best read in one gallop for sheer speed of argument. Learned though Prynne’s writing is, it also affirms Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”.
The 78-year-old poet dedicates this latest gathering of his work to “the Future” — itself a surprisingly old-fashioned idea. The book ends with a passionate, abstract vision of the fullness of life, “For Tom”, which seems to weigh every word for its human meaning:
Brim over plainly moreover, inspect dear heart
passing swell, felt patched, fill to all loyal found.
J.H. Prynne, Poems 2016—2024
Reading Notes 2024—
I’ve been reading J.H. Prynne’s new work as it appears in small-press pamphlets for 25 years now. It’s hard to say whether the first encounter with a poet has a special place in memory because it was the first. But I do think I got lucky with Pearls That Were and Triodes (both 1999) — the latter is full satiric free-verse Prynne, the former elegant rhyming lyric. Here is a quatrain from Pearls that I often think of:
The overlapping of familiar phrasing across the final enjambment (wayward in heart / heart to heart / heart-breaking) is a verbal sleight-of-hand that recurs in all the verse Prynne has written since, although not always to such graceful effect.
Pearls That Were, of course, snips a phrase from a line of Shakespeare (“Those are pearls that were his eyes”) and makes it a peculiarly Prynne-like construction. He has long been fascinated by tripartite titles where each word seems to stand slightly apart from the others, vibrating with its own meaning like a molecule e.g. Day Light Songs, Down Where Changed, Unanswering Rational Shore. It’s a microcosmic example of what his poetry has increasingly done with its diction more generally. In Poems 2016—2024, half the sequences have three-word titles:
Each to Each (2017), OF - THE - ABYSS (2017), Of Better Scrap (2019), Squeezed White Noise (2019), Her Air Fallen (2020), Passing Grass Parnassus (2020), Torrid Auspicious Quartz (2020), See By So (2020), Duets Infer Duty (2020), Otherhood Imminent Profusion (2021), Athwart Apron Snaps (2021), Dune Quail Eggs (2021), Lay Them Straight (2021), Sea Shells Told (2022), At Raucous Purposeful (2022), Not Ice Novice (2022), At The Monument (2022), Hadn’t Yet Bitten (2023).
Too much of this and you begin to hear other things as Prynneisms:
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