Product Description

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. When his Poems was first published in 1999, it was immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry. This expanded edition includes four later collections only previously available in limited editions.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1158618 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.50" h x 6.10" w x 9.00" l, 2.30 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 592 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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