Month: November 2025

The letter from Prynne, which I received 8 years ago now, was prompted by the question of what is order. Looking back and thinking about some recent poems by Sheppard in ‘litter’, I would think that it is exactly what the poet needed to know, to write the poem, and it’s exactly an expansion of that – into science etc. – which Prynne added to the art, which is by necessity an authentic expression of the poet, thereby vitalising language. This is the shadowy order or aura to collections like the white stones. I’m currently studying at the OU, writing about the science of natural beauty, but have no poems to add.

I was thinking about Prynne again. When I first looked at this collection, in ‘Poems’, I must have linked the repetition of ‘heart’ in the first poem to the ear, because I came away from it thinking of the collection’s poems as structured like the underground prison of the Labyrinth (look out a minotaur!). On the surface, it reads like a plea that he might escape his lover in some way, and I am curious if that’s a tone or meaning that a reader who has mastered false ambages that make a deeper structure will also order the poem with. Anyway here’s a poem

let’s trap

thirst conspire to tongue
(juniper flip aghast dash catapult)
tic
roof against no
dress-

ing

Cagey
Now I write above love,
wholehearted letters of
shapes held for us both
letters spill like mouths

Hope
The old song on pigeons,
oh look, dancing gives
time to say it done, hope.