The poetry of J. H. Prynne has, over the years, acquired the justifiable reputation of being a radically hermetic, exceptionally challenging, formally radical, and encyclopaedically wide-ranging body of work, very much in that twentieth-century tradition of Anglophone modernism as essentially established by two poets of American origin, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, but further developed, in its American strain by poets such as Charles Olson, a relatively early, and lasting influence on Prynne's work, and Edward Dorn, with whom Prynne maintained a lifelong friendship, as well as, in its British strain, by poets as disparate as Basil Bunting, Alan Fisher, David Jones, to take three especially prominent British examples, and not least by Prynne himself. Despite this burgeoning reputation, as possibly the most talented and significant living poet writing in English, his name is still appears to be unfamiliar to a remarkably wide range of people with a strong interest in poetry and therefore the first part of this review will attempt to provide a brief outline of his work and its critical reception before proceeding to consideration of Matthew Hall's recent publication On Violence in the Work of J.H. Prynne in the second part. Born in 1936 in Bromley, a suburban town of London sometimes characterised as the most middle-class place in England and the home town of both Hanif Kureishi and David Bowie (who moved there from Brixton when he was six), Prynne became a student at Cambridge who never completed his Ph.D.. on Thomas Hardy but who won a Mellon Fellowship to the United States, went on to gain a life fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, and became, in addition, librarian and director of English Studies at the same college, one of the oldest, largest and, until recently, one of the wealthiest in Cambridge. Prynne's first volume of poetry, Force of Circumstance and Other Poems, published in 1962, was not included in the later editions of his collected Poems, representing his mature poetic output. The latter begins with Kitchen Poems (1968) and The White Stones (1969) and was very much, though not necessarily primarily (given the exceptionally broad range of Prynne's reading), influenced by the work and person of Charles Olson, the materials for whose Maximus IV, V, VI were substantially organised by Prynne himself. All of Prynne's mature work, with the possible exception of Kitchen Poems, published by Cape Goliard, was released through small presses, with the result that, if one was not a student at Cambridge or a regular visitor to the more radically inclined bookshops of the period in London, most notably Compendium Books (sadly no longer with us but my own usual first port of call on a lightning raid from the north to the capital, back in the day), the first problem facing the well-disposed reader of Prynne's already unusually demanding poetry was literally accessing a copy of the latest collection. Rather in the manner of Charles Olson, Prynne's first two major volumes of poetry, as indicated above, addressed t...