J.H. Prynne was not a name to conjure with when I was a first-year English student at Cambridge in 1966. As far as I knew, he was just another lecturer whose lectures I didn’t go to. By 1968, though, I was more involved in poetry, writing it and planning to launch a poetry magazine with my friend and fellow poet Nick Totton. Nick had read Prynne’s recently published Kitchen Poems and was full of enthusiasm for it. When I bought my own copy and sat down to read it I was simultaneously baffled and captivated, a state of mind that has been repeated each time I’ve opened a new book by Prynne in the 58 years since.

The five poems were like essays in their apparent substance, but they had a manner, a rhythm and a music, as well as a density of thought that shifted my idea of what poetry was and what it could be and do.…