Single Tangle Mine (2026) by J. H. Prynne, Face Press. Courtesy of Ian Heames.

Whenever I find myself in London, the first thing I do is go to the London Review Bookshop, down the street from the British Museum in Bloomsbury. I ask a bookseller to take me to the basement floor and open the supply closet. There, along with the shop’s buckets and mops and other cleaning supplies, are two shelves containing the latest sequences by the poet J. H. Prynne (1936–2026). Released in limited editions with print runs of between a hundred and two hundred and fifty copies by small presses in Cambridge, these beautifully designed and sometimes miniature chapbooks are kept in the supply closet in order, I assume, to prevent theft. I must have visited it half a dozen times since 2016, when Prynne was first recommended to me by a friend as a way of getting out of a particularly interminable reading slump.

Prynne saved poetry for me. Reading The White Stones (1969), rereleased that year by NYRB Poets, I experienced at thirty-three the same sense of wonder at what it was possible to do with the English language that I felt when I first read The Waste Land at fourteen, and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror at twenty-five. It was an experience that, at the time, I was worried I would never have again. Of course, I did not know then what we know now: that, entering his ninth decade, Prynne still had more than seven hundred pages of poetry in him; in other words, that there was more of his work yet to be read than had already been written, a late-in-life burst of literary activity comparable only to that of Friederike Mayröcker. Despite his age, Prynne never seemed to belong to a bygone era; his poems were always ultracontemporary, unless they were of the future. After I finished the great yellow brick of the third volume of his Poems—spanning Kitchen Poems (1968) and Al-Dente (2014)—he became the only living artist in any medium whose every new release I felt compelled to get my hands on as soon as it became available.

For whatever reason, my enthusiasm for the work did not translate into interest in the man. Even now, I find it difficult to conjure up an image of Prynne, or of what his voice sounded like—not that these were things he made widely available. Information about him—the disavowed first collection, Force of Circumstance (1962); the correspondences with Charles Olson and Ed Dorn; the rivalry between the avant-garde British Poetry Revival and the Movement represented by more mainstream poets like Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis; the coterie of poets he established in Cambridge, where he was a librarian at Gonville & Caius College; the engagement with Chinese poetry and heterodox Maoism; the near-Talmudic commentaries on English poetry—reached me sporadically, like rumors. I think I knew that he was already in poor health when I put the Bloodaxe Books edition of Poems 2016–2024, a collection that includes the twenty chapbooks I took home from the supply closet along with sixteen others, at the top of my New York Times ballot for the best books of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Otherwise, our one-way relationship was mediated exclusively by paper and ink.

It was only when Prynne died in Cambridge on April 22, at the age of eighty-nine, that I began to read about him, starting with the obituaries. Two months later, on my way back to Berlin from delivering a paper on Jeff Dolven—who, along with Joshua Kotin, interviewed Prynne for this magazine—at the University of St. Andrews, I stopped off in London to make one final pilgrimage to the supply closet. I read his last two sequences, Which Scarf Match, published in March, and Single Tangle Mine, published in early April, on the plane. When I reached “Foxglove Alimony,” the concluding poem of Single Tangle Mine and thus of his body of work, I did not feel what I sometimes feel when a great writer dies—that wistful ingratitude accompanying the knowledge that there is nothing more of this mind left to encounter. The reason, I suspect, is this: it will be many years before I, or anyone else for that matter, catch up with Prynne’s mind.

All easy poets are alike; each difficult poet is difficult in his or her own way. Prynne’s poetry cannot be discussed without reference to its difficulty. What drew me at first to poems like “The Numbers,” “Aristeas, in Seven Years,” and “L’Extase de M. Poher” was that their difficulty was of a type that I already knew and enjoyed. The early “philosophical songs”—in the words of the poet Keston Sutherland, one of Prynne’s ablest interpreters—feature recondite diction, spliced syntax, and open-field lineation; juxtapositions of prehistory and current events; the importation of the vocabularies of such discourses as geology, metallurgy, and economics; and the unattributed allusions to the poets of Greco-Roman antiquity, Chinese classics, and British Romanticism. All of these were familiar to me as a reader of Pound’s “Rock-Drill” and “Thrones” cantos, Olson’s Maximus Poems, and Dorn’s Gunslinger.

What I came to admire most about Prynne, however, was that he did not view this suite of “late Modernist” rhetorical gestures and techniques as the exhaustion of formal possibility. Once a decade, if not more often, he published a collection or sequence that would deliberately and recalcitrantly deepen the level of difficulty. The Oval Window (1983) puzzled everyone, until N. H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, acting on information provided by Prynne himself, revealed some of its source materials. The “oval window” refers to a “rough opening” in a medieval stone house in Tinkler Crags, east of the Lake District and south of Hadrian’s Wall, whose ruins now stand on land owned by the Ministry of Defence. Prynne’s photo of the structure he describes as “not quite a cabin” appears on the cover of the first edition. That there are direct borrowings from the Bible, Ovid, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and the poets of the tenth-century Chinese anthology Among the Flowers is one thing, but without Reeve and Kerridge’s annotations probably no one would have found out that “strips of brighter green” is taken from Sir Archibald Geikie’s 1904 Scottish Reminiscences or that “looping ahead with do and while” is taken from Brian Kernighan and P. J. Plauger’s 1974 technical manual The Elements of Programming Style, or that “smartly clad” is taken from an August 1983 review in the Times of a performance by the Texas rock trio ZZ Top. 

Trying to get a handle on Red D Gypsum (1998), a sequence from what was already being called Prynne’s “late-late” period, Nigel Wheale, to take another example, calls our attention to what is conspicuously absent from the poems: narrative, spatiotemporal context, speaking persona. Without these time-honored means of hermeneutic orientation at his disposal, Wheale instead examines the cover design; gives a brief geological, cultural, and etymological history of gypsum; and connects the appearance of financial terminology throughout the sequence to the epigraph, taken from a book on managing derivatives.

By the time we get to the thirty-five-line, five-sentence stanza of “Foxglove Alimony,” not only are there no pronouns to denote a speaker or addressee, there are no articles either; there are two, maybe three prepositions and a single conjunction. What remains are 155 words, fewer than half of which would figure into anyone’s daily vocabulary, whose parts of speech, grammatical mood, and tense are not always possible to determine with any certainty—to say nothing of which of the possible definitions is being used in a given instance, and which word or phrase is supposed to modify which. The result looks less like Chomsky’s “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”—the sort of perfectly grammatical, but nonetheless nonsensical proposition beloved of the Surrealists and their imitators—as it does like this: 

             Redstart formaldehyde incessant kite
opaline gruesome pantechnicon, irritate mortal
arresting summitry decorate wallow oiled
filigree retrograde. Misted in
dewfall coral anthracite serpentine
castigate, arachnid pellucid canopy ecstatic; arrest
divested reduction phantom symptom curtains
ascertain fusion tunnel or
bangle, litany guitar abrogate synthetic
monumental, attentive petrel oceanic raffia
gratin portentous gentian portcullis languid bid.
Wayfaring judgment cadmium optimal
elevator trachea, irritating
marquetry insensible fictional passional
fabulative advancement; lancet pricket
wilderness—foxglove alimony shine
exacting forage haystacks
intrusion camphor, millstone subsequent prime.
Remittance pertinence grit
assumption partition ultimate cramp
genuflect greengage agony
cascading snowfall; imbricate persistent attune
panoply scattering howsomever coverlet antidote;
share alreadiness congruent alongside pant
refugee overland sledge silage imitate allocate.
Investigate emollient split cloudbank pursuant to
snail track forgiven evenly electoral, violet asserted;
openly colourant wrist matching held.
Pungent exclusive mastery, oblique additional veil
attraction cherished soon,
impartial sumptuous vacancy esteem
lobster franji-panji ocular courage essential
riotous precaution bouts
crewel; silverweed magnetic kindred sundered
intarsia buttermilk glabrous phoenix.

These words at first appear to be arranged according to a principle that is sonic rather than semantic. No poet, in my view, has come closer to realizing Pater’s dictum that “all poetry aspires to the condition of music” than the late-late-late Prynne. His enchanting, incantatory lyrics have been compared to the atonal compositions of Berg and Stockhausen, but I think they’re best captured by Ben Phillips’s description: “remixes of the dictionary.” I find reading a poem like “Foxglove Alimony” for sound rather than sense—what Kerridge calls “horizontal reading”—to be immensely satisfying, but nonetheless unsatisfactory on principle. Is it just too difficult to read vertically?

In one understanding of the term, a “difficult” poem is simply a poem that we do not yet know how to read. In fact, you might describe the vast proliferation of literary theories and methodologies during the twentieth century, from close reading to distant reading, as a series of complex hermeneutic machines invented for the purpose of making sense of the resistant language of Modernist writing, even if they were also put to other uses. In the annotated edition of The Oval Window, and in edited collections such as A Manner of Utterance (2009) and journals such as Glossator and Hix Eros, however, the first generation of Prynne’s critics has had recourse to an older tradition of textual interpretation: philology. They have adopted Prynne’s practice from his book-length commentaries on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94, Herbert’s “Love (III),” and Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper”—in which each semantic unit receives one or more paragraphs of historical contextualization and etymological analysis—to read Prynne himself.

Single tangle could refer to the design of a metal “pricket” candle sconce, a type of space manifold in geometric topology and knot theory, or a repetitive pattern drawn for the purpose of meditation in a New Age version of Zen. A “single tangle mine” could thus be read as a place out of which patterns are extracted. (Unless the sequence’s titular tangle is a “coil,” like Hamlet’s “mortal coil,” and “mine” is a possessive pronoun, such that the phrase means “my one life,” a not-unfitting title for a poet’s last collection, even a poet as impersonal as Prynne.) Following the lead of the aforementioned critics, I looked up every word in “Foxglove Alimony” to see what patterns I could discover there. 

What emerged was a series of lexical clusters—one of which, interestingly enough, concerned patterns, in the form of decorative handiwork: filigree, marquetry, crewel, intarsia. Others included the natural categories of Pliny the Elder, Carl Linnaeus, and twenty questions: animal (redstart, snail, kite, arachnid, coral, petrel, pricket, lobster, phoenix), vegetable (foxglove, raffia, haystack, greengage, silage, franji-panji, silverweed), and mineral or chemical (colourant, formaldehyde, anthracite, serpentine, synthetic, cadmium). Finally, I noticed a cluster of terms with medical associations, perhaps reflecting the conditions or setting in which Prynne was writing: trachea, camphor, emollient, ocular, lancet, cramp, phantom symptom, antidote, mortal. With regard to the last word, a pantechnicon (literally, “all the arts”) is a horse-drawn removal van named after a nineteenth-century company that sold carriages and furniture in London; perhaps it is called “gruesome” because the furniture removed by it will be the poet’s body, making it a hearse.

Of the many threads that might undo these knots, I’ll tug on the obvious one here. Foxglove is a flowering plant indigenous to the British Isles. Its campanulate petals are long enough for bees to disappear into, which is the function the flower serves in sonnets by Wordsworth and Keats, and in the first stanza of Prynne’s “Again in the Black Cloud” (1974), where “towards purple, the white bees / swarm out from the open voice gap.” Its flowers, seeds, and leaves contain a chemical compound that can be deadly for humans to ingest, but is also the active ingredient in a class of heart medications.  This would make the foxglove a kind of pharmakon, which readers of the Phaedrus will recall is the contronym Plato uses to describe writing, which he says is both the poison and the cure for memory. In Iron Age Celtic cultures, the flower, colloquially known as dead man’s bells and fairy gloves, was laid on graves to protect the dead on their trip to the underworld. On this reading, “foxglove alimony” would be the price one pays to the earth following one’s divorce from life. 

I suspect, however, that Prynne chose the Digitalis purpurea for its color. The word purple derives from the Greek word porphura, the name of the reddish-violet fabric dye, or “colourant,” made out of the “track” secreted by a gland of the sea “snail” Murex in the Phoenician city of Tyre. This, at least, is what connects the first and the last words of the poem: the “redstart,” or Phoenicurus phoenicurus, a bird that can be found in the Foxglove Covert, a nature reserve created on Ministry of Defence lands in North Yorkshire in 1992, and the “phoenix,” a bird that burns and rises from the ashes once every five hundred and forty years, which can be found as a symbol for the cyclical nature of time in nearly every folkloric system from the Nile to the Yangtze.   

As both Wheale and Beci Carver note in their respective commentaries on Red D Gypsum and Dune Quail Eggs (2021)—which, like a quail egg, is small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand—no reading of a Prynne poem would be complete without considering the material features of the printed object in which it appears. The white cover of Single Tangle Mine features a circle made out of small black flecks. The same circular motif can be found on the last page, immediately following “Foxglove Alimony,” in a square image which depicts a cartoonish bird surrounded by the flowering branch it holds in its claws and its beak.   

Giustiniani riggiola featured in Single Tangle Mine. Courtesy of Ian Heames.

Curious about the image, I emailed Ian Heames—whose Face Press published Single Tangle Mine and many of the other Prynne chapbooks in my collection—to ask where he found it. He told me that it was a riggiola—or hand-painted majolica tile—probably eighteenth-century, from the Neapolitan ceramics firm Giustiniani. “I found it on eBay,” Heames wrote, “and it immediately staked a strong if somewhat occulted connection with the title of the book and the phoenix with which it ends.” There was “something oddly comic” about the bird’s pose, he added, “in a sawing-off-the-branch-you’re-sat-on sort of way.” 

Digging a little further, I learned that the designs of Nicola Giustiniani’s tiles were inspired by those on the walls on the floors of the villas that had just been excavated in Pompeii, which was destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. One of the casualties of that event was Pliny the Elder, who, as the commander of the Roman fleet in the Gulf of Naples, courageously led the rescue operations. Pliny’s ten-volume treasury of first-century scientific knowledge, the Naturalis Historia—which contains, among other things, much of our information about Tyrian dye production and the legendary phoenix—was in its final revisions when he died of smoke inhalation on the beach at nearby Stabiae. As for the image on the cover of Single Tangle Mine, Heames called it a wreath. Not of funerary cypress or even triumphal laurel, I thought, but of eternally recurring ash.