Presume Catkins

Presume Catkins is a sequence of six poems by J. H. Prynne in which the characteristic procedures of his late work are concentrated into units of exceptional density. Each poem is built from nominal and verbal phrases that resist paraphrase, accumulating through a grammar of adjacency and pressure rather than syntactic subordination: plants, minerals, weather systems, liturgical terms, trade words, and bodily registers jostle against one another without resolving into argument or image. Published with a note directing readers towards Médecins Sans Frontières and the crisis in Yemen, the pamphlet refuses the separation of lyric from political emergency, without making that refusal an occasion for rhetoric.