Recurrence and Remembrance: Reading J.H. Prynne’s “Reach Up” and “Morning” from Al-Dente (2014)

The recent poetry of the British neo-Modernist J. H. Prynne has often been characterized as an increasingly disparate and intractable body of work. Two poems from Prynne’s collection Al-Dente (2014), “Reach Up” and “Morning,” are approached here on the assumption that these are parts of a consistent poetic project. With a recourse to Wordsworthian transcendentalism and to Prynne’s own critical prose, a tracing of the poems’ embedded networks of eclectic references uncovers a potential organizing theme: the dialectic between existential continuity and corporeal mortality. In “Reach Up” the individual experience of the present moment, and its subsequent recollection within marked time, is a way of deflecting the ongoing reality of corporeal mortality. “Morning” extends this concern by questioning how self-experience and memory are communicated and absented via language, and by placing individual acts of remembrance within a wider historical ambit of human expression.