Poems: (2005) second edition - Tapa blanda

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) *

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 This edition was superseded by the 2005 expanded second edition including four later collections only previously available in limited editions, and that in turn by the 2015 third edition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.