Laurie Price appears in the archive with Then force the picture cloth overhead, preserved in the twenty-first installment. The poem moves across a beach and town through intense light, sand, bronze cannons, fortification spires, a laughing boy, a camera shutter, heat, gulls, rising water, biting flies, memory, shoes, and an unfamiliar mirrored face. Its syntax keeps these materials in motion, allowing observation, association, bodily sensation, and recollection to enter the same continuous field.
Picture cloth and camera
The title introduces an act of covering connected to picture-making. Inside the poem, a camera shutter appears through the repeated sound “clic clic,” and that mechanical sound becomes a measure of passing time. Photography therefore enters the poem through both title and sound.
This relation gives Price a natural place within poetry attentive to visual perception. Light, framing, surface, and the instant of the shutter shape how the scene is experienced.
Light and sand
Sunlight and sand recur throughout the poem. Slivers shiver in light, the noon sun changes, heat sends a shimmer along the beach, and the town appears ringed in sand. These repeated materials give the landscape a bright, unstable surface. Heat alters vision and turns distance into movement.
Readers exploring modern poetry can follow how Price uses physical environment as a source of syntax. The poem’s long flow resembles the shimmering and undulating conditions it describes.
Fortification and town
Bronze cannons and fortification spires enter beside a young boy’s laughter. Historical architecture shares the scene with ordinary human activity. The town shifts toward the scale of a city, surrounded by sand and nervous gulls, while the dead and the departed briefly enter the poem’s field of awareness.
The juxtaposition has affinities with experimental poetry that lets historical residue, present observation, and associative thought coexist in a single verbal movement.
Tide, flies, and skin
Water begins moving quickly with the suddenness of a rising tide. Flies then bring the poem directly to the body by biting skin and raising red welts. That physical irritation restarts a chain of associations, linking present sensation with earlier engagements and losses.
Readers interested in poetic forms can approach the poem through this associative continuity. Images generate further images through contact, sound, and bodily response, giving the poem a fluid structure without stanzaic segmentation.
Walking and reflection
The later movement emphasizes the act of placing a foot in a shoe and walking through weighted, humid air. Frailty becomes part of the landscape. A mirror supplies an unfamiliar face, extending the poem’s attention to visual surfaces from photographic apparatus toward self-recognition.
The closing language turns toward undulation, invented or altered wording, minaret-like forms, and a birdlike grasp of previous locations. Place and memory remain mobile to the end.
Reading Laurie Price
Then force the picture cloth overhead is driven by sensory accumulation. Light, sand, camera sound, architecture, birds, tide, insects, skin, heat, and memory arrive through a sustained syntactic current. The poem continually changes scale while preserving the physical intensity of the beach and town.
Within contemporary poetry, Laurie Price’s archived contribution offers a vivid study of perception under pressure. Photography, landscape, history, bodily sensation, and recollection merge into a restless surface whose details keep generating further associations.