On these pages I'd like to offer readers a speech, essay, article, interview, workshop note or perhaps a short story, updated on a regular basis. Please follow the links on the left to other stories.

         In THE WINTER PRINCE, Mary Villiers is a ward of King Charles I, the wife of the Duke of Richmond and Lennox, and lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta-Maria. She is also a poet: I based this on the historical possibility that she was the unidentified 17th-century author who gave herself the name Ephelia.

        Rupert is in love with Mary, but he is a warrior, not a poet: what’s he to do if he wants to send her a love poem? It’s beneath him to borrow other men’s words, but he knows Mary admires Shakespeare’s sonnets, so he has an ingenious idea: he goes through all 154 sonnets and chooses lines that will make up his own secret message of love. His first four lines, all from different sonnets, are:

If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
To find where your true image pictured lies,
Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee.

        To read the whole sonnet, and to find out how Rupert gave it to Mary without anyone else guessing, wait until you get to page 133 of THE WINTER PRINCE.

        This word game is centuries old, though I didn’t know that when I thought it up in Costa Rica in 2005, while I was writing THE WINTER PRINCE. I ordered a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets from the Libreria Internacional in Escazú and the moment it arrived I went to work on Rupert’s behalf. Once I’d “found” his sonnet I wondered how many others might be buried in the dazzling treasure trove that Shakespeare left us.

        I’ve discovered lately just how old my literary trick is. “Cento” is a Roman word meaning “patchwork”. The first recorded cento came from the fourth century AD, when a woman calling herself Proba Falconia took 694 lines from the Latin poet Virgil and put them together to form a story of the life of Christ. She is supposed to have done it in an attempt to convert her husband to Christianity.

        The ancients believed that there was magic in the lines of great poetry, and if you mixed them up the magic still operated. Do lovers depend on other people’s magic in the love messages of our day? In a way they do. The lyrics of love songs are usually poems. Everyone who requests a song on radio to be played for the one they love is calling on the mysterious power of poetry to move the emotions.