Nearly Too Much

This is the first book-length study of the work of J. H. Prynne, who has been described by Peter Ackroyd as `without doubt the most formidable and accomplished poet in England today, a writer who has single-handedly changed the vocabulary of expression'. The book sets out to introduce Prynne's poetry to a larger audience than it has hitherto received and the authors examine the work in relation to traditions of Romanticism and Modernism, recent theory, debates about Modernism and Postmodernism, political questions of discourse and power, and the implications of lyrical uses of scientific and technical material. The impetus for these discussions is provided by detailed, exploratory readings of individual poems and sequences from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s. Nearly Too Much succeeds in the difficult task of providing both a knowledgeable and sophisticated analysis of Prynne's poetry for those to whom it is familiar and a helpful introduction for the benefit of a larger public to whom the work is new.