News at Eleven: [J.H.] Prynne's poetry is difficult

and obscure because his work is both radical and extreme. It is radical because he is a philological poet: when he uses a word, he does so in full knowledge of its etymological resonances, its historical usages, and its literary echoes. As he remarked as far back as 1963, "Once a poem gets written and I have located a word which this poem has given to me--I've won out of the English language another word for my small vocabulary of words that really mean and matter to me--back to the etymological dictionary: where does it come from, what does it originally mean, what great hinterland of implications lies behind this perhaps quite ordinary word?". His poetry is extreme because it is drawn to unsolved and possibly insoluble questions--in economics, biological science, philosophy, and so on--where models of understanding break down, and where uncertainty and paradox emerge; and to extremities of human life, for example inhospitable or polluted environments, medical situations, poverty, starvation, torture and war.

from The Times Literary Supplement: J.H. Prynne, a poet for our times

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