Jeff Dolven Picks J.H. Prynne's Parkland as a Favorite 2020 Read

The Paris Review asked its contributors to fill us in on their favorite books of 2020, and it's all Jeremy Prynne for Jeff Dolven. Although Prynne told Dolven and friend Josh Kotin that "he was quite possibly finished with writing poetry" for an interview four years ago, "the last four years, however, have mocked our credulity. There have been a dozen books over that span, published, like all his work, with devoted small presses, and word has it that his quarantine has been busy. From this ongoing late harvest it is the book-length, mostly prose poem Parkland that has moved me most." More about this pick, from the UK's Face Press:

…Prynne is a poet of words, and his poetry is at its most intense when sentence forms fall away, and other relations come forward. That makes it famously difficult to read. All our ideologies are made of sentences, he knows, and more than that, all our sentences are ideological, and so he forces us toward new ways of putting words together. I recommend the book for that challenge, and for the syntax lost along the way. Also for its reach into the past: it is like reading Milton, if Milton were your mother, trying to spare you the Fall even as she broke the news; it is like Philip Sidney (his great Arcadia!), if poets were fated never to compete. Finally, I recommend it just because I have been reading it slowly, an hour a week, with Josh [Kotin], over Zoom, and it gives me a chance to recommend that practice, which has been a help through these latter months of 2020.

Consider this, and other great selections, at the Paris Review.