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.' – John Clegg, The Telegraph (Poetry Book of the Month)

'Prynne’s determined craft of language connects our world of the Now with the world of our Past.' – Ian Brinton, Litter magazine, on Poems 2016–2024

‘While one might have expected an update of Prynne’s already monumental Poems, the arrival of more than 700 pages of new work is a remarkable turn of events […] Here is a book to keep us busy for a very long time.’ – David Wheatley, The Guardian

'Without doubt the most formidable and accomplished poet in England today, a writer who has single-handedly changed the vocabulary of expression.' - Peter Ackroyd, The Times

'Prynne presents a body of work of staggering audacity and authority such that the map of contemporary poetry already begins to look a little different.' – Roger Caldwell, TLS

'This book is one of the most inventive, intelligently experimental collected poems of the century.’ - Adam Phillips, Observer

‘Poems is a vast slab of a thing, but its luminous and unsettling poems richly repay the attention they demand.’ – David Wheatley, Guardian [on the third edition of Poems]

‘The place to start with Prynne is The White Stones (1969), one of the great volumes of postwar British verse. Poem after poem of quick, light, original perception re-frames the world with extraordinary freshness.’ – Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times [on the third edition of Poems]

'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)

‘Prynne is refractory yet astonishingly lucid.  First poet of the world for some things.’ – John Kerrigan, Times Literary Supplement (Books of the Year 2015)

‘Poems 2016-2024 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.’ – John Kinsella, Overland Literary Journal

‘Since his 300-page 1982 gathering Poems, which collected all he felt worth preserving at the time, Prynne has delivered three subsequent “bricks”: 1999, 2005, and 2015, the last of which approached 700 pages. Now at eighty-eight years old, he’s added the equally colossal addendum Poems: 2016-2024. It is a magnificent, startling output during what might be the poet’s closing years of writing life. […] The expanse of Prynne’s output during these last eight years is astounding. Poems: 2016-2024 shows an unparalleled poet holding forth at the height of his powers...’ – Patrick James Dunagan, Rain Taxi Review of Books

J.H. Prynne (1936-2026) was Britain's leading late Modernist poet. His Poems (1982) collected all the work he wanted to keep in print up to that point, beginning with Kitchen Poems (1968). An expanded and updated version was published by Bloodaxe Books with Fremantle Arts Centre Press in 1999 as Poems. Four further collections were added to the second edition of Poems in 2005, followed by a further seven along with a group of uncollected poems to the third edition of Poems (2015).

The decade following Poems (2015) was the most productive period of Prynne's life, with over thirty limited editions published between 2017 and 2023. To have added these to a fourth edition of Poems would have doubled the size of that volume. His Poems 2016–2024 was therefore a separate, supplementary edition of his later work, including, except for minor corrections, the unchanged contents of 34 texts, from Each to Each (2017), written in 2016, to Hadn't Yet Bitten (2023), as well as the corrected 2023 text of At Raucous Purposeful (2022). His later work was published by Face Press in four further pamphlets: From Obsidian Cobalt (2024), Doric Plumage (2025), Which Scarf Match (2026) and Single Tangle Mine (2026).

Prynne published a wide range of critical and academic prose, including works on Saussure, Wordsworth, Shakespeare. His essay on New Songs from a Jade Terrace, an anthology of early Chinese love poetry, was included in the second edition of the book from Penguin in 1982. He also wrote poetry in classical Chinese under the name Pu Ling-en. His 1969 collection The White Stones – central to his poetics – was reissued in 2016 by New York Review Books with an introduction by Peter Gizzi. An annotated, illustrated edition of his 1983 collection The Oval Window, edited by N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018.

Prynne's most productive decade also saw the publication of three prose works, Graft and Corruption: Shakespeare's Sonnet 15 (2015/2016), Apophthegms (2017) and Whitman and Truth (2022), along with editions of Prynne's correspondence with Charles Olson (2017) and Douglas Oliver (2022). His two-volume Collected Prose is forthcoming from Oxford University Press (New York). A seminal interview with Jeff Doven and Joshua Kotin, 'J.H. Prynne: The Arts of Poetry No.101', was published in Paris Review, 218 (Fall 2016).

Jeremy Halvard Prynne grew up in Kent and studied at St Dunstan's College in Catford and Jesus College, Cambridge. He was a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 2005 he retired from teaching English Literature as a Lecturer and from his posts as University Reader in English Poetry for the University of Cambridge and Director of Studies in English for Gonville and Caius College; he retired as Librarian of the College in 2006.

Each to Each (2017)    9
OF · THE · ABYSS (2017)    23
Or Scissel (2018)    35
Of Better Scrap (2019)    67
None Yet More Willing Told (2019)    143
Parkland (2019)    161
Bitter Honey (2020)    195
Squeezed White Noise (2020)    207
Enchanter’s Nightshade (2020)     251
Memory Working: Impromptus I-XXVI (2020-21)    269
Her Air Fallen (2020)    297
The Fever’s End (2020)     305
Passing Grass Parnassus (2020)     329
Aquatic Hocquets (2020)     355
Kernels in Vernal Silence (2020)     373
Torrid Auspicious Quartz (2020)     383
See By So (2020)     395
Duets Infer Duty (2020)     399
Orchard (2020)     411
Otherhood Imminent Profusion (2021)    417
Presume Catkins (2021)     427
Athwart Apron Snaps (2021)     435
Efflux Reference (2021)      443
Dune Quail Eggs (2021)    455
Lay Them Straight (2021)     459
Shade Furnace (2021)     465

Snooty Tipoffs (2021)    477
Sea Shells Told (2022)    543
At Raucous Purposeful (2022/2023)    551
Latency of the Conditional (2023)    571
Not Ice Novice (2022)    585
At the Monument (2022)    593
Foremost Wayleave (2023)    631

Hadn't Yet Bitten (2023)   653

Timepiece in Total (2024)  679

Alembic Forest (2024)  695

Bibliography    713
Index of Titles or First Lines    715