Poems 2016-2024 (Bloodaxe Books) is a massive, vibrant and immersive collation of JH Prynne’s small press publication across this period. Some would call it a late life creative flourish, a glorious coda, but I don’t see it this way. Rather, this is an accumulation of concerns across a lifetime that have both relied on earlier form work and newly “discovered” expressions of genre (in poetry, and generally speaking) that require recasting, resaying, and varying. This is fused with an immediate political concern for resisting oppression and Western “world domination” in its many forms. It’s not about creativity as bonus: it’s about linguistic action as necessity.

The collection is an invigorated body of new work from a poet both continuing his poetics research, and setting it off on many new methods of approach. This is a paradoxical work of reinvention, witness, testament, and reading — deep reading of old and new texts. If a poet needs to be a reader, Prynne enacts reading as he makes his texts. He reads as he writes. What is read is written, and vice versa. A read idea is an idea exposed and examined in his processing.

The “playful” in Prynne is easily understood on the level of semantics (from pun, riddling, allusion, homophone, digression, metonym, conceits folded into conceits, and so on), but maybe we too easily miss that he is also cocking a snoot at a poetry world that for many years burnt him and also burnt many others striving to contest the conformity and reductivity of “traditional” closed poetics.

Finding his kinships with Olson and Dorn (as much as with aspects of Eliot’s formal approaches), Prynne’s modernism wavered and twisted back on itself to re-embed Shakespeare and Wordsworth, ancient Chinese poetry and contemporary Chinese poetics, “metaphysical poets” and their later interpreters (Keston Sutherland’s Hot White Andy is more than an echo in the tome), and Prynne’s early French translator Bernard Duborg. Prynne’s kinships are serious and also part of the détournment (not a term I imagine him “liking”, though I’ve never asked) that drives poetry outside modernism, beyond the techno-industrial, into a type of agrarian communalism (maybe exemplified by Cambridge colleges) that joins booklets, poems, and stanzas like mycelia.

JH Prynne is a deeply imbued post-pastoral poet. Younger William Wordsworth come back in demonic form, he makes political acuity a sense-response, and lexicons a tactile accumulation. Maybe readers “in the know” now approach Prynne with the resolution to decode, to track the references, but this is to reduce the work to a set of possible instructions, or a logical approach to material reality. The work necessarily invites, even implores decoding, but also resists and amuses itself with such attempts.

Driven by a semiotics of “the lyric”, it escapes the lyric, and constantly surprises in doing so. This new poetry is frequently evasive as much as declarative, and its ambiguities are feedback loops that keep a reader from seeing the more obvious: the lyrical tenderness that is floored and flawed by a “pastoral tradition” that has failed to address the crises of the times, to implicate itself through a Marxist dialectical reading of history and class as it smashes into the rural ideal and presentations of “nature”. And this is more complex than a solo English take on the pastoral — in fact, English versions of the pastoral are undone into a decolonising repatterning of poem structures and literary tropes. This new poetics also subtexts and directly approaches many languages and cultures, and considers old as well as new imperialisms, the ravages of techno-industrialism (Prynne has never had a fetish for new machinery or tech), the brutality of authorities who would drive refugees into the sea (take the furious protest of Of · The · Abyss (2017): “a stricken boatload far out to scan”), the torture-based projections of power of states, the profiteering that exploits workers and the nonpatricians of community.

Further, Prynne weighs up issues of chance and fatalism, choice and inevitability. Finding humans the authors of their own demise as much as the authors of just responses to injustice, Prynne weaves a matrix of language strings that correlate with mathematical precision to both number patterns and fractals. So often at the core of a dense set of such weaving — usually a sequence of poems or agglomeration of “titles” under an indicator title with epigrams — is a “simple” experience or set of experiences: an observation of a bird, the coming across a plate in a Renaissance text, the simple complexity of the Geneva Bible, which then radiate into contemporary but also broadly historic concerns. The mixing of micro and macro happens on so many different levels, and the (re)grammar(ing) of expression becomes pivotal to unfolding dense works as much as more “playful” rhyming (even nursery-rhymish) works such as Snooty Tipoffs (2021), a truly magnificent unweaving of pastoral motifs and their crooks and spurs.

Prynne is not a “surreal poet” on any level — words and lines and stanzas are too structured and functioning of a conscious level to be that — but his poetry can evoke a cascade of almost automotive responses. Rather than being in a trance when he writes, he can place his reader in a trance in which chasms become planar, and the sculpture of the poem starts to affect us with flashes of light and sweeps of shadow. I have always read Prynne as I view visual art, and heard his poems as I listen to madrigals, canons and, strangely, chants. If every word might seem to appear in sequence, every word (and word shifts and difference are often legion) from a lexicon deployed, every word also evokes a sound-visual response. Immersion becomes hallucination.

I have read vast amounts of Prynne to our son Tim when he was a child and teenager, as I did Finnegans Wake, and his understanding of the effect of the language far exceeded mine because he let association create its own meanings. So rather than decode, he took it as a reality through which he might then decode the world. The non-surreal had surreal effects that then became psychological tools for perception and processing.

Because so much of Prynne’s poetry seems to build by accumulations of words as semantic units working in juxtaposition through parataxis rather than hypotaxis, a reader can often miss the lyric underpinnings of even the most consonant, jarring, lexically-driven line. Prynne poems are so often responses to the here and now, written in situ, but mediated through his bibliophiliac reading practice and scrutiny of socio-political events.

It’s interesting to compare, say, four poems across the span of the book, each responding to different global and local events, different theories and concepts, while deeply observational on a micro level.  Let’s start with “Cartoon” from 2017’s Each to Each and the first poem in the book, which begins:

Eyes burning like owlets reaching filmic
attention, shadow across the face of outpost
plummet capture.

The “natural” is flipped through an artifice of viewing, and immersed in a frontier-like vulnerability. Then this from the middle of ‘Six Leaves Rush’ from Squeezed White Noise (2020):

panorama witty plunge intense shore-line paraffin
edict, addicted gristle intubate refreshment …

which moves against grammatical “types” of words to medicalise and pathologise “the view”. Published in the first year of the pandemic, it more than makes you reflect on unfolding events, whether it was written at that time or not. When and how we read matters.

As a literal reading approach for a second or third reading of a Prynne poem, I often use that old speed-reading technique (but slowed right down!) of reading slant, or from the top left corner diagonally to the bottom right. It helps see the implanted connectors, to understand the alternating and non-binary grammar.

Prynne’s poems, in their consistent and unforgiving critique of capitalist exploitation and manifestations of power, prioritise the disaffected but also the natural environment which best supports humanity. In a favourite sequence of mine, Duets Infer Duty (2020), we begin ‘Deck 1’ with ‘Sycamore calico evident’ and beginning the first line of the last couplet we read ‘scalene open maple’. This binding across the structural field-guided politics of the poem is a way of entering its anti-pastoral textuality, the lyrical intensity of the webbing that informs Prynne’s body of work across the many decades. And if we then swing through the book to the intense and magnificent lyrics of Not Ice Novice (2022) we begin with:

Sycamore or lesson
vanes spinning to fly
new seeds at session
off out over the sky

The trees speak, the seeds speak, the rhymes speak and the short lines speak to each other (and across the page to other stanzas) … and they carry their own message outside the almanac.

Read these poems aloud, as we do at home, and the echoes of so many poems from earlier centuries come to mind, but we think about them in unique ways because Prynne’s lyricism is always “post-lyric”, generative and draws you into considerations of the injustices of people towards people, and people towards all else that makes up “existence”. There’s beauty in there as well, even if it’s never for its own sake.

Image: a detail from the cover of the book