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 his Poems was first published in 1999, it was immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry. This expanded edition includes four later collections only previously available in limited editions.

"J.H. Prynne's Poems is a collection, thirty years in the making, in which the language is both astonishing and inevitable. Such a level of intelligence, control and risk is shocking."
lain Sinclair, Independent on Sunday (Books of the Year).

"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

"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 themÖ 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, The Guardian (Books of the Year).

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