This is a lovely reflection on the appeal of J.H. Prynne’s poetry, as something which “sounds rather as if it might be this sort of sonic translation of something else, of a ravishing poem in a language I do not know”. I particularly like the fact that Victoria quotes from both Pearls That Were and Triodes (both 1999), which were the first JHP pamphlet sequences I read when they were newly published, and which remain among my favourites. Side by side, they exemplify the lyric and satirical poles of his work (though with elements of each mingling in both) in two new and different formal modes, and were I suspect a kind of self-contradicting fresh start prompted by the appearance of his collected Poems (1999).

On the comparison with Hill, it’s interesting that his work took a prolific ‘turn’ around the same time, and also opened up much more to… everything, from The Triumph of Love (1998) onwards. Hill was also an important poet for me at this time, and I still read and think a lot about his late work, but as a reader I feel a fundamental difference of aesthetic, and ethic, in the use of words: Prynne delights to make words echo with all their possible connotations, while Hill is much more consciously in control of his pointed ambiguities. Which perhaps speaks to the distinction here between Prynne as a joyful poet and Hill as a melancholy one, although both can do a memorable line in both bitter humour and lyrical pleasure. It also explains to me why they didn’t get on, personally or artistically: for all their shared interest in dictionary-digging, they were looking for fundamentally different things in the (English) dirt — which, broadly speaking, can be mapped onto the cultural anthropologies of left wing (Prynne) and right wing (Hill) politics in the post-war period.