{"id":5092,"date":"2015-10-08T08:07:46","date_gmt":"2015-10-08T07:07:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5092"},"modified":"2016-01-23T14:41:50","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T13:41:50","slug":"r-f-langley-complete-poems-carcanet-12-99-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5092","title":{"rendered":"R. F. Langley, Complete Poems<\/em> (Carcanet Press) \u00a312.99"},"content":{"rendered":"

This volume is a Complete Poems<\/i> in the sense that Elizabeth Bishop published her Complete Poems<\/i> in 1969: these are the poems which Roger Langley completed for publication.\u00a0 This volume is also similar to Bishop\u2019s book in that it is full of poems which seem both perfected and perfect. Perhaps Langley, for whom Pound was a guiding light, would be averse to further comparisons with Bishop, but comparisons there are.\u00a0 Both Bishop and Langley were obsessed, that much is clear, with looking and seeing clearly.\u00a0 Jeremy Noel-Tod in his comprehensive introduction to this volume quotes Ruskin, \u2018The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see <\/i>something, and tell what it saw<\/i> in a plain way,\u2019 to indicate how Langley might have voiced a credo on this matter.\u00a0 Langley\u2019s poetic roots are clearly in that aspect of the Romantic tradition;\u00a0 Noel-Tod quotes Langley as citing Coleridge\u2019s \u2018conversation\u2019 poems as an important influence on the writing of the poems, and in particular Coleridge\u2019s \u2018This Lime-tree bower my prison\u2019.<\/p>\n

Another, and very different influence on these poems is Charles Olson, whom Langley discovered together \u00a0with\u00a0his friend, J.H. Prynne, while they were both undergraduates at Cambridge.\u00a0 Apparently, as a school master, Langley was wont to give Olson\u2019s \u2018The Kingfishers\u2019 to his sixth-form students;\u00a0 clearly, very, very bright sixth-form students!\u00a0 There isn\u2019t a great deal of Olson\u2019s \u2018open-form\u2019 amongst these poems;\u00a0 Langley often uses stanza forms or long poems which run seamlessly down the pages.\u00a0 But Langley isn\u2019t afraid to break a line between an article or a preposition or an adjective and its following noun.\u00a0 And Langley is Prynnite enough never to be afraid to disrupt syntax or phrase structure:\u00a0 \u2018This.\/ Must. And so must this. In bitter little\/ frills and hitches.\/ About in a suspicious\/ twiddle are the tips of someone\u2019s ten\/finger which could, sometime, touch\/ mine.\u2019 \u2018The Gongoneion\u2019.\u00a0 There is something of Prynne\u2019s gorgeousness about those lines, and not just in the repeated short \u2018I\u2019 sounds;\u00a0 Langley, like Prynne, is a very sensual poet and the poems are full of his running through the senses and their engagement with the \u2018real\u2019 world.<\/p>\n

To adduce Bishop again, there is, as with Bishop\u2019s Complete Poems,<\/i> a wonderful sufficiency to this book;\u00a0 a lifetime\u2019s work on 180 pages including the introduction, notes and indexes.\u00a0 Sufficient as this book feels, it is clear that Langley\u2019s death at 72 robbed the world of a poet who was at the height of his powers.\u00a0 Not simply \u2018To a Nightingale\u2019 which finishes this book and which won Langley a posthumous Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2011.\u00a0 Other poems in the second half of the book show a writer who was completely at home with his gifts. One such is the utterly magnificent \u2018Achilles\u2019; which walks us up the path and into a church where the majority of the poem is an examination and meditation on the marble tomb of one Elizabeth Havers, \u2018In sixteen-thirty-three, when she was\/ twenty-five, on a creamy marble slab\/ in the south aisle, they drew Elizabeth\/ Havers.\u2019 The ambiguity of \u2018drew\u2019 here seems perfectly poised, coupled as it is with \u2018when she was\/ twenty-five\u2019. But then the shock of, \u2018The\/ kylix has been cracked.\u00a0 The mend in it spoils\/ this cheek-piece and his mouth, but there is still\/ his eye, under the helmet\u2019s rim, as he\/ stabs her from the right. She reaches up to\/ touch his chin.\u2019 Langley\u2019s \u2018intrusion\u2019 of Achille\u2019s killing of the Amazon queen, Penthesileia is undoubtedly odd, even shocking, as is Langley\u2019s other depiction of Elizabeth Havers\u2019 being sixty-five when Newton was making his experiments on the prism and the spectrum.\u00a0 But Langley\u2019s extraordinary ability is to control his material and create a fitting inevitability about it all. \u2018Achilles\u2019 finishes with an exquisite description of a heron wading through sunlit water. And, yes, I, too, had to look up \u2018kylix\u2019 \u2013 a broad, flattened drinking cup, as well as \u2018alizarin\u2019, and \u2018gamboge\u2019, which also occur in the poem; \u2018gamboge\u2019 comes a number of times in the book.<\/p>\n

This is a book of many wonders and profound pleasures to which the reader will return and will savour again and again. Perhaps the British, too, have a \u2018poets\u2019 poets\u2019 poet\u2019.
\n 
\nIan Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This volume is a Complete Poems in the sense that Elizabeth Bishop published her Complete Poems in 1969: these are the poems which Roger Langley completed for publication.\u00a0 This volume is also similar to Bishop\u2019s book in that it is full of poems which seem both perfected and perfect. Perhaps Langley, for whom Pound was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nR. F. 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