Bloodaxe Books were kind enough to send me a copy of J.H. Prynne’s massive Poems, which weighs in at 590 pages and covers work spanning from 1968 up to 2004.A fellow of Gonville & Caius (that’s pronounced Keys riff-raff) College, Prynne is a somewhat controversial figure, I gather, in that vanishingly small circle of people who hold firm views on the state of contemporary poetry. For his supporters, Prynne is a unique voice, an unabashed advocate of the Modernist ethos that sees nothing wrong in making readers work before allowing them to arrive at some (usually provisional) meaning. (Whether jumping through the hoops High Modernist art holds up is still quite as demanding in an age when you chuck esoterica from, say, The Waste Land into the Google search box and get an instant gloss is a question I will leave for a (far later) day.) To his critics, Prynne is an arch-obscurantist, threading together almost arbitrary jargon to weave the Emperor’s new clothes. The combative Don Patterson has this to say, more about Prynne’s admirers than the poet himself it has to be admitted:”we have the avant-garde so desperate for transcendence they see it everywhere: they are fatally in the grip of an adolescent sublime, where absolutely anything will blow your mind, as your mind, in its state of recrudescent virginity, is permanently desperate to be blown. The Norwich phone book or a set of log tables would serve them as well as their Prynne, in whom they seem able to detect as many shades of mindblowing confusion as Buddhists do the absolute.”You can perhaps start to make up your mind about what camp you might choose to join by reading an online presentation of “Rich in Vitamin C” with an accompanying commentary by John Kinsella. Whether Kinsella’s comments help elucidate Prynne’s work is open to question. I will venture my own tentative and amateur remarks within the next few weeks on the electronic pages of Three Monkeys Online. I need time with this book. Indeed, as Prynne warns his students in some occasionally hilarious advice, adopting the tones of a stern 1950s governess at dinnertime, “Collections of poems that are intricate and demanding cannot be gobbled up all at once.”