Ryan Ruby at the Paris Review:
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.
more here.
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