J. H. Prynne is Britain's leading late-modernist poet. His work as it has emerged since the 1960s when he was close to Charles Olson and Edward Dorn is marked by a remarkable combination of lyricism and abstraction at once austere and playful. <i>The White Stones</i> is a book that is central to Prynne's career and poetics and it constitutes an ideal introduction to the achievement and vision of a legendary but in America still little-known contemporary master.