JH Prynne, the modernist poet whose work is considered hard to grasp but rewarding for the reader who persists, has died at the age of 89. His poetry has been described as opaque, hermetic, impenetrable, and forbidding, yet it also possessed a musical quality that made sound and sense inseparable.
As Robert Potts wrote in the Guardian: "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." Prynne's lines reward readers who take the time to engage with them, as seen in Smaller Than the Radius of the Planet from The White Stones: "I lay out my / unrest like white lines on the slope, so that / something out of broken sleep will land / there."
Described by Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Books as "Britain's leading late modernist poet," Prynne first gained prominence in the late 1960s as part of the British poetry revival and maintained a cult following throughout his life. His early collections, such as Kitchen Poems (1968), The White Stones (1969), and The Oval Window (1983), move between lyrical and philosophical registers, often within a single page. However, Prynne was not an abstract formalist indifferent to history. His later poem Refuse Collection (2004), inspired by the Abu Ghraib prison photographs, is fiercely political, employing brutal and jarring military-industrial language: "To a light led sole in pit of, this by slap-up barter of an arm rest cap, on stirrup trade in crawled to many bodies, uncounted. Talon up crude oil-for-food, incarnadine incarcerate, get foremost a track rocket, rapacious in heavy investment insert tool this way up."
Astley observed: "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." Prynne himself explained his creative method: "If two words are placed together that are not normally associated as from the same field of reference or meaning, a kind of semantic spark or jump may be created that is intensely localised within the continuity of the text process: it may be a kind of 'hot spot' that burns very bright but which the reader can quite quickly assimilate within the larger patterns of composition."
In Smaller Than the Radius of the Planet, technical language from sources like the scientific journal Nature is juxtaposed with lyrical language to create a love poem: "And so, then, the magnetic influence of Venus sweeps its shiver into the heart/brain or hypothalamus, we are still here, I look steadily at nothing. 'The gradient of the decrease may be de- termined by the spread in intrinsic lumin- osities' – the ethereal language of love in brilliant suspense between us and the hesitant arc. Yet I need it too and keep one hand in my pocket & one in yours, waiting for the first snow of the year."
Born in Bromley, Kent, Jeremy Halvard Prynne was the son of Miriam (nee Andrade), a teacher, and Halvard, an engineer. He was educated at St Dunstan's College, Catford, and then Jesus College, Cambridge, graduating in English in 1960. Admitted as a fellow of Gonville and Caius College two years later, he served as its librarian for 37 years and taught English for more than four decades. His pupils included poet Keston Sutherland, now a professor at the University of Sussex.
Prynne's first collection, Force of Circumstance and Other Poems, was published in 1962 but later rejected by him as "uncomfortable, disorderly, imitative, facile, foolish, childish." He was also a formidable scholar and literary critic, producing commentaries on poems by Shakespeare, George Herbert, and Wordsworth, and a monograph on Ferdinand de Saussure titled Stars, Tigers and the Shape of Words (1993). His engagement with classical Chinese poetry and friendship with historian Joseph Needham led him to write poems in classical Chinese under the name Pu Ling-en. In 2008, he gave the keynote speech at the First Conference of English-Poetry Studies in China on the difficulties of translating "difficult" poetry.
Poets and editors who corresponded with Prynne, including those at Broken Sleep Books, noted his kindness, thoroughness, and attention to others' work. Despite assumptions that he prized only the difficult and obscure, Prynne read poetry in all registers with keen attention. A two-volume Collected Prose of his essays and criticism is currently in production with Oxford University Press. He is survived by his wife, Suzanne Furmston, whom he married in 1969, and two daughters.
