The poet J.H. Prynne died this morning.
Jeremy was important to a whole host of us down the generations for a whole host of reasons, politically, personally, and above all, poetically. For his avant-gardism; for his careful, critical, ethical attention to the specificities of poetic language; for his unorthodox Maoism, however that was understood; for his personal kindness and encouragement; for the kinds of permission his work opened up. Of the poems written during the period I knew him, the most important to me remains the life-work summary of Kazoo Dreamboats (2011), written during the era of the financial crisis through the lens of Piers Plowman’s societal vision, via modern scientific textbooks, ancient funeral rites, and Maoist dialectics. A particularly treasured memory is Jeremy’s reading of a substantial portion of this poem to the student occupation of Lady Mitchell Hall, Cambridge in November 2011, alongside the veteran feminist campaigner and author Selma James. Insisting on making this a poem which could speak to the occasion and the political struggle, without compromising the fierce difficulty of the work itself, the reading was forceful and moving. When Jeremy read out the line “Rule One: people with top pay are rubbish”, the room was electrically charged, a charge that seemed to come both from the poem and to enter into the poem from outside. What I learned from this moment was that the poem itself does not change its context, nor does the context change the poem: but that their dialectical relation adds something to both.
Other works from these years that I treasure: the “bruised compassionate dismay” of Of . the . Abyss (2017), a pamphlet I had the honour of publishing, which overlays Victorian child cruelty and the present migrant crisis; and the enquiry into the entanglement of British imperialism with poetic song in Parkland (2020): a complex, insistent and direct enquiry into how the poet can sing when empire starves those other “fair field full of folk” elsewhere; a poem which movingly and deeply wants to believe in the possibility of poetry as lyric joy, but is totally lacking illusion about poetry as salvation; a poem that ask how the poet can go on singing their song when that song gets conscripted as the national anthem; that treats poetry with a near-devotional cast, yet radically questions whether poetry is morally complicit with corrupt orderings, if not actively harmful, then at least insufficiently attentive to or able to frame harm; a poem concerned with a national verse tradition, that ruthlessly interrogates the bases behind that tradition in the interests of a fervent, anti-imperialist internationalism; a poem rigorously dialectical, as dialectic is a practice of dialogue and question in origin, but as it is also the ruthless criticism of all that exists, and the very conditions for that questioning.
Language is no innocent playground, yet the ludic is important to Jeremy’s late work, with its insistence that contemplation, play, and purposive activity be not separated. I love, too, the playful and unsettling rhyming poems of Snooty Tipoffs (2021), the dense compaction of Al-Dente (2014), the fables and orchards and tales and streams of language that are the river all those late books swim. But maybe most of all I love the text ‘No Universal Plan for a Good Life’ (2010), a didactic summary in clear prose of the ethical position Jeremy believes poetry to hold, written for the context of people’s struggle in Nepal. I treasure both the text itself and the act of imaginative extension and solidarity it performs. And this is what I want to hold onto, about J as a person and about his work, this act of imaginative solidarity, this absolute belief in the power of poetry, this ethical rigour this thinking through of the question of spirit and matter, this permission and this belief that poetry matters. I think I’ll carry that with me throughout my life. I hope I do so.
At play and at work there in language, into which he has now gone—at play and at work and now and then at rest—a life.

Berlin, Wednesday 22nd April 2026