The poetry of JH Prynne, who has died aged 89, has been called opaque, hermetic, impenetrable, forbidding even, and at times it was all of these. But it also sang. To read his Kitchen Poems (1968), The White Stones (1969) or The Oval Window (1983) is to encounter a writer for whom sound and sense were never separable. As Robert Potts wrote in the Guardian : “Prynne is hard-going, off-putting and much disliked by many more traditional writers; he is also, when one gets into him, so good that he changes the way you think and feel.” Prynne wrote lines that reward the reader who slows down with them, such as these from Smaller Than the Radius of the Planet, from The White Stones: “I lay out my / unrest like white lines on the slope, so that / something out of broken sleep will land / there.” That image, of a mind preparing a surface on which something unbidden can arrive, might stand for the whole of his six-decade practice.…