The White Stones [Paperback]

J. H. Prynne is Britain’s leading late-modernist poet. His work, as it has emerged since the 1960s, when he was close to Charles Olson and Edward Dorn, is marked by a remarkable combination of lyricism and abstraction, at once austere and playful.The White Stonesis a book that is central to Prynne’s career and poetics, and it constitutes an ideal introduction to the achievement and vision of a legendary but in America still little-known contemporary master.“[Prynne’s poetry] can induce the same combinations of fear and wonder once associated with the sublime...It is undeniable that his poetry offers both pleasures and challenges of an unusually complex kind: and it is for precisely this reason that many people will testify, without hyperbole or sentimentality, that his poetry has changed their lives.”—Robert Potts,The Guardian
 
“Prynne’s work is challenging, yes, but also funny...politically incisive, erotic, and philosophical. It puts into play the most diverse range of discourses imaginable and doesn’t make it easy for the reader to decide how or even with what attitude to respond...Prynne’s work reminds us that poetry, besides offering a variety of sensorial and emotional pleasures, can be something with which to think.”—Forrest Gander,Chicago ReviewJ. H. Prynnewas born in Kent in 1936 and studied at Cambridge University; he worked there as a teacher and scholar in the Department of English and is currently a life fellow of Gonville and Caius College. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Sussex, and a Visiting Professor at Sun Yat-Sen University, People’s Republic of China. He has published forty-one collections of poems during the period 1968–2015, all now reprinted in the third enlarged edition of hisPoems(Bloodaxe Books, Hexham, 2015).

This volume,The White Stones, was composed in the earlier l³+