J.H. Prynne. Poems 2016–2024. Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2024. 752 pages.





It can be shocking and pleasurable to experience J.H. Prynne’s high-energy surface constructions and beautiful, agile soundscapes. A new release from Bloodaxe, Poems 2016–2024 (2024), offers us the opportunity to mount a referendum on the sentiment that the late Modernist poet is overly allusive or obscure, since questions of difficulty tend to persist in even exceptional Prynne criticism. Consider the following passage from Of Better Scrap (2019)’s “Top Silver Deliver,” collected in the Bloodaxe volume, the first assemblage of poetic works from Prynne since 2015:

Eximious talent infringe the bill, tap-tap mend

or modify bred cantaloupe nightly bird on brede

gullet orient sprinkle and dropping, on purpose

top silver deliver pannier floated. Not or to fit

even before latency what’s in mind eventual sip

elute insolvency, gang-plank for milk repeating,

repent, reticent infarct hand to mouth intervene

marsupial slight cling scrape finally in venture

to vertical [. . .]

The lines are strange, disjunctive, even downright weird. But “gullet orient sprinkle,” with its play of els, the consonant-matched word endings in gullet orient, the ri and then the rI, and the near-rhyme between ul and kl, is lovely. Trochee, dactyl, trochee, each word’s first syllable emphasized. And, as the above passage indicates, Prynne’s work can be a space in which to test the way one’s mind works against flurries of semantic chain reactions—lubricated and catalyzed by sound.

Prynne knows the energy and history of words. He harnesses what the syllable kar- means and has meant, as it crashes into your eyes, ears, lips and tongue. Look at the consonant clusters in “marsupial slight cling scrape finally.” A reader might imagine a mammal clinging gently to the interior of a fleshy envelope. Following Jeremy Noel-Tod’s remarks in the Cambridge Companion to Modern Poetry (2013) on Prynne and granting that “the presiding discipline of the oeuvre [. . .] is philology,” a reader might commingle “marsupial,” Greek, with a simple pouch, but also “scrape,” more emphatically and kinetically Germanic in English, with scratch with the fingernails. Then, the initial velvet inner-womb-stuff of a marsupium contrasts, texturally and linguistically, with the harsh grating actions of clawing and scraping (doesn’t scr itself . . . evoke a sensation in the fingertips?), a verb now repurposed to refer to intangibles like digital data—“scraped” off a website, or license plate info “scraped” via traffic cameras—so tactile and primordial is the meaning-ledger, the signified melted generationally into signifier. Thus a mammal may pass from mollifying innocence to coarsened experience (“in venture to vertical”). When we read Prynne, these vectors flow in and out of each other in mechanisms we might call synesthetic; as the poet Lisa Robertson writes, “Prynne puts the cut into the phoneme, amplifying meaning’s refraction.” And if all this should prove the makings of a merely “beautiful enigmatic surface,” what Richard Kerridge claims prevails when readers fail to look up every line of Prynne on Google Search, that seems akin to suggesting that some human erotic activity once in a while leads to “mere orgasm.”

Prynne is a scholar-poet in the way few endeavor to be. He has penned dense and recherché monographs on Shakespeare, metallurgy, Saussure and huts; he has preserved disenfranchised poets’ manuscripts, saving poetry from abandonment and flood; his annotated bibliographies are carved with scalpels. We know he disavows linkages between his projects and other difficult poetic avant-gardes, especially those that want to establish a companion critical apparatus. He once called the praxis/theory relationship in American Language Poetry “radically flawed.” It is tempting, then, to imbue Poems 2016–2024 with what is purported to be a density of reference and a rigorousness of scholarship. But when we read Poems 2016–2024, his work in a plain descriptive sense must be peeled back from his own assertions about it, since it straddles Veronicah Forrest-Thompson’s antiabsorptive modalities as much as the smooth, fleet-of-foot velocities of Gerard Manley-Hopkins (“trim out to foible smooth clearway riding up high” (Of Better Scrap)). His work can be open to anyone.

There are many ways to approach the “difficulties” in Prynne. I’m partial to suggesting that the esoteric languages and discontinuities fluorescing across a Prynne poem can be experienced as providing the feeling of the esoteric, the unknown, and the discontinuous. Both in life and in reading, we might endeavor to rectify that lack of comprehension by sheer exquisite citizenry or hard work, or we might not have the luxury; we might experience incomprehension conceptually—e.g., as expressive, inhering in communication’s manifest offering. Say someone never crosses into recognition. Maybe that experience is not always pleasurable—in a poem, maybe it’s a species of aesthetic pain. Ian Brinton, commenting on “Refuse Collection” (2004), notes a distinction between its “difficulty and obscurity,” two different kinds of pain perhaps, but claims that the latter, though it does exist, proves attributable to a “range of references” while the former involves, productively, “layers of meaning [that] require the reader to be especially vigilant and alert to nuance.” The pleasure is embedded in the pain, in some reactions to Prynne, then. Indeed, John Clegg writing in The Daily Telegraph advances the following sentiment, more relevant than ever to Poems 2016–2024:

J.H. Prynne’s work is difficult, but (unlike the work of many other difficult poets) it is not at all cryptic. There’s no sense of meaning being withheld or obscured; nothing cries out for elucidation. It doesn’t mean, in that sense, at all, and if instead of getting annoyed by it you allow yourself to be swept away, it is buffeting and exhilarating, not at all like any other poetry in the world.

Poems 2016–2024 assembles the poetic work composed by J.H. Prynne between 2016 and 2024. As the back cover of the ochre volume proclaims, this was a “productive period” for Prynne, who wrote the books in brief sequences released by Face Press with the odd edition by Critical Documents and Equipage between the ages of eighty and eighty-eight. The book contains, to put it one way, thirty-six chapbooks—even if it feels strange to apply that diminutive term to the lapidary Torrid Auspicious Quartz (Poems 2016–2024), at twelve pages long, or even to a momentous collection like Brass (1971) was, in Prynne’s previous Poems 2015, at twenty-nine. These thirty-six chapbooks, though, visually and conceptually distinct on occasion, nevertheless share a species of texture, vision, and verbal methodology similar to the aforementioned passage from Of Better Scrap; the styles dissolve into one another. Here’s another excerpt from a poem from five years and 600 pages later, published in Hadn’t Yet Bitten (2023). The passage is representative:

Fend mendacious polyglot impetus

off tempest least swept star-born rhyme

perishable insertion celeriac urgency pink at

blanket evidently bunsen crocodile panopticon

blister scathing accidentally sweltering badges,

moreover impudent crusted worsted slated

buttercup ecstatic pricket monastic [. . .]

The reader arrives at the comma—a small score of breath beyond the flail of glossolalia, a “mendacious polyglot impetus,” and it’s quite lovely after all that speed. Perhaps there’s less punctuation here, fewer prepositions, more adverbials than in Of Better Scrap. But if we look to Or Scissel (2018), Bitter Honey (2020) or Lay Them Straight (2021), the disparities in prosody, diction, and ~eyefeel can seem negligible bracketing all but the most granular readings. These thirty-six chapbooks feature, then, diction, punctuation, pacing and tone that in some sense can be approached interchangeably. Prynne has been working like this since, I might suggest, Red D Gypsum (1997), with the mode attaining a kind of refinement of purpose—the connective tissues of normative grammar slowly titrated out, project by project—by To Pollen (2006). It is this almost-hallucinogenic liquidity that marks Prynne’s late style. Deployed with consistency and power, bound in an 800 page codex, and ushered through with refinement of vision and prolific output, this late-style book practically canonizes itself.

Poems 2016–2024, however, also reveals variations on the dominant style. Memory Working: Impromptus (2020–21) proceeds in slightly more regular sentence-shapes in justified paragraphs waxing on the theory and structure of music; Snooty Tipoffs (2021) deploys nursery-style psilocybin rhyme schemes with generous notes of bathos; Not Ice Novice (2022) lays down parallel quatrains in “glitter packs” with no punctuation; At the Monument: A Romance (2022) extrudes lengthy lines and each page is headed by a blocky glyph. And, near the above quotation from Hadn’t Yet Bitten (2023), one sequence features poems inexplicably preceded by consecutive letters of the alphabet. Throughout, however, Prynne’s consolidating and refinement of style is clear—lacking the “distinct break with precursor practice” he once described requiring between projects in an interview. The “Cloth squares yield their / rank order[,]” as Prynne puts it, and that’s fine by me, as the mode is so singular and vivid and beyond anything anyone else is writing in 2024, or has in fact ever written. The discrepancies between later books in Poems 2016-2024 remain of a different nature than Wound Response (1974)’s distinction from High Pink on Chrome (1974), or To Pollen’s difference from Sub Songs (2010), where variety seems occasioned by a kind of rupture; the sameness is increasingly the point.

Prynne’s signature formula is three astonishing words in a row. Keston Sutherland saw this to be the case when he titled his essay—perhaps the finest thing written on Prynne—“Hilarious Absolute Daybreak” (Glossator 2010 vol. 2 no. 1); Robert Potts as well when he called his London Review of Books article “Smirk Host Panegyric.” Some delights from the pages of Poems 2016–2024 include: “fluid lung tremble,” “curt lucid odium,” “mortal mayonnaise triumph,” “total rudiment pumice,“ “cream horizontal luft,” “flocculent tuft fittings,” “profile halo tinker,” “forfeit dark planet,” “lissom portrait manacle,” “moist riverine caddis,” “is misery non-vital,” “torque scimitar hustle,” “pointed flexuous tabby” and “inflected prime lozenge.” Bringing out the microscope—are these triadic constructions mainly two adjectives stacking against a noun, or are they three slippery parts of speech the reader will fail to discern? The formulations produce, even in isolation, proliferated grammatical pathing characteristic of late Prynne. Is “smirk host” an adjectival modifier of “panegyric”? Is it a particular kind of “torque scimitar” that’s hustling? Are we profiling a person’s act of tinkering with a halo or are we creaming horizontal luft, and is the horizontal luft cream-colored? I enjoy reading profile halo tinker as someone tinkering with their user profile in the Xbox game Halo (unlikely something intended by Prynne, but you never know) or observing the way halos appear in profile in a Renaissance painting—tinkering with that angelic viewpoint. And, asking whether or not Prynne intended, inserted, hid away or enclosed these referent-clusters is to miss the point. We might instead ask why we scramble for a hint of Prynne’s purpose when, with other writers or poets (or with students, for instance), we see authorial intent to be the wieldy amalgam of fallacies and biases that it is.

Prynne once claimed at a reading: “The last thing I want to do is introduce obstacles to the reader.” And yet if difficulty is to be embraced or transcended in a way of reading beyond the search engine paradigms for which Richard Kerridge advocated, we must confront the very legitimate strangeness of a poem like “Familiar Left Hand”:

Frost at noon, singular and fragile assign rapier point

aftermath as well indent, splash out unaltered blighted

witty fleece, pull back into foremost perpended ground;

melt and sip deceptive as seen from otherwise platter in

servery flummery receipt life for pudding, lifted driver

fret by fury; swallow or narrow drift opaline in atoned

lost image tracework magnify several times over at new

second chance attraction [. . .]

Here, clauses blur into other clauses, nouns convert into verbs, prepositions abound and reach in different directions, “even the most seemingly innocuous parts of speech [. . .] are prevented from carrying out their usual functions” (Meningham & Kinsella), chatty colloquialisms oil the lines, and soon parts of speech are just freely transposing to create a kind of garden path sentence, yet in a context where you’re not sure there’s a sentence occurring at all. (The phenomenon of a garden path obtains when a reader mis-parses a correct sentence and must circle back and re-parse it, especially a sentence engineered to compel that circling back.) The garden paths proliferate almost infinitely. First assign a rapier point, then splash out an unaltered fleece, then pull back into ground, then melt and sip as seen from otherwise, then swallow or narrow a drift opaline . . . Parsing disarms itself, again and again and again. That’s because Prynne’s writing succeeds in actually disarming the will to parse, freeing the reader from the shackles of agreement and referent and bringing them into their own flowing agency. Faced with the multiplicity of interpretive avenues, the grammatical proliferations, these poems enjoin us to confront our own role in how we make meaning, to acknowledge that we’re “the world in which [we] walk,” as Wallace Stevens memorably put it. The reader—finally, blessedly—has a bit of control. The poem becomes a mirror offered to one’s own cognitive and personal contingency. And as we read, the “intervals [are] flecked with subject” until we “skim off all there is” and just fly. Is this freedom?

In the above passages and elsewhere, Prynne is contributing to the longstanding and commendable experimental poetry project of denaturalizing discourses that purport to greater objectivity. Prynne’s poems destabilize and disturb the normative thrusts of media and science discourses, cracking open the scientism of capital and flinging us from our linguistic and civic complacency. Prynne smuggles positivist and violence-based discourses into the purview of poetics, making a mockery of languages that don’t want to admit they’re metaphorical. As he writes in Lay Them Straight (2021), mixing parataxis and anacoluthon to force resource extraction, local government, biology, and kitchen table onto the same plane: “dreg scoop ocean beds ministry tangent / nutritious candidate obligate protein snack.” A mangled yet coming community, “error function for non- / final sky.”

There’s a sense in which the most figurative Prynne poems are, on first glance, the most welcoming. In a collected volume where stable, referential meaning is rare, poems with seeming-subject matter become authentically occasional cases of the world cohering—a realistic depiction of how rare it is to lucidly perceive the real. Prynne’s mimetic range often entreats the reader’s trust in a stable scene that the aggressive sonic parallelism—the patent sound-pattern of the words—conspires to dispel. Here, rather mimetic, is the first stanza from “Sweet Vernal”:

Went to mow a meadow, extended grasses

           in scrap cut own, swiftly

down and down. Bent to lie, scented

           cry hay vocal for quick in a box

as if so never let go [. . .]

Prynne’s “fluid layers of answering tone clusters” call out to one another in a matrix of sound relationships, forming a scene made of, and made into, the patterns formed cutting grass. “Mowing” an enjambed meadow, the vowels and consonants knit together and jerk apart, the scene fuzzy at the edges but there’s surely a scene. Visual rhymes between “mow” “-dow,” “own” and “down” intermingle with aural ones between “mow,” “meadow,” and “go”; and when “meadow” is improved by the letter en to “down,” along the way a dee is shorn to make “cut own,” a surprise. Then that surprise is changed, healed, by the flowing vowels of vocal, so, and go—permitting us to return to “a meadow.” The bucolic and representational register can evoke a scene, setting, and character rather easily—Levin’s perspirant divine awakening in Anna Karenina, for instance—as much it can craft a rhymed and sonic dell-place like Marvell’s “The Garden” (“green thought in a green shade”). Even the anaphoric lines flowing up and down “A Wreathe” by George Herbert, sonic and concrete at once, feel relevant. There’s a politics in the figurative, in this rare scenic lucidity, as much as there is in the scene’s turn away from the facts of political violence and toward the leisureliness of mowing and laying in the hay (the poem continues, “just one silicon bonding dilatancy”). Is this leisure or labor, pleasure or pain? Prynne never maintains representation for long, never delays a kind of swerve, pivot or gash, as he persists in writing poems that “recogniz[e] complicity with social injustice and war,” as Kerridge adroitly puts it. The straying into mimesis, in this passage, the foregrounded and imbricated cancellations of sound, the ~depiction of an apotropaic turn away from violence to leisure, the complex anti-representational difficulties of the neighboring work—in all this noise, are readers really all that besieged? Who would try, truly, to paraphrase this work? We’re reading, but we’re also mewing on our own thirst for meanings, our “tongue glued / to the roof of discretion” as the “notes slide to come / home deserved by succession ready to be glad.”

More than any writer I can think of, Prynne’s poetry is open to anyone, so long as we’re capable of forgetting some of the ways we’ve been taught to read. The newer ways are, I think, as enjoyable as they are revolutionary; Prynne senses this, surely. Consider “Yet Why Not”:

                              [. . .] Insist did rim-perfect as

few ever will before not soon, holding wrist

in front, look back taken [. . .]

It might look like nothing, insufficiently glinting or packaged. But the sounds here, perfect, few, soon, taken, match and play off each other’s emphasis positions, swinging up and down the stanza with unobstrusive gentleness—setting aside garden paths. Sound proves extraordinarily fluent, virtuosic with syncopated prosodies no one I know of can equal. A mixture of Frost and Virgil, there, intertext I see because I choose to, helps to make the lines first “cryptic next all gleaming”: Orpheus looking back down the road not taken. Prynne’s work, in the free play of sense and sound, and in the late style consolidated and on display in this volume, deserves our full attention.