Selected Early Work
J. H. Prynne
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Recommended by John
A joy to see the wellsprings of what would become the early masterpieces; generously edited, also including essays and letters.
From the publisher
J.H. Prynne (1936–2026) was Britain’s leading late Modernist poet. His Poems (1982) collected all the work he wished to keep in print, beginning with Kitchen Poems (1968). An expanded and updated version was published by Bloodaxe Books in 1999 as Poems, with a second, expanded edition in 2005, and a third in 2015; this was joined in 2024 by a very substantial volume collecting all the subsequent work to that date. Another four slim collection were published after that by Face Press. Prynne was a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
Selected Early Work includes the entirety of the author’s suppressed first collection, Force of Circumstance (1962), together with some uncollected early poems and some likewise uncollected early prose pieces―letters, reviews, and essays, none of which are scheduled for inclusion in the forthcoming compendious two-volume Collected Prose from Oxford University Press.