Synopses & Reviews
Visual art, French film, Shakespeare, natural history, and weather are all put under a unique microscope in this selection of poems. Originally based upon a series of notebook observations, the poems—presented in a late modernist style—range in subject from Palladian architecture to Rauschenbergs pop art, from Bressons cinematography to Bottoms dream. Demonstrating a nostalgic affection for rural English and European landscapes, these poems uncover surprise and truth in the most ordinary of moments.
Review
"Wonderfully inventive, bursting with linguistic exuberance . . . Langley is one of poetry's best-kept secrets." —Whitbread Poetry Prize judges
Review
"The quality of Langley's writing is extraordinary. On first reading I found myself bolt upright, the book falling from my hands as his poetry tore through me." —Randolph Healey, author, Daylight Saving Sex
Synopsis
Roger Langley's poems explore perception. They take their bearings from forms as diverse as Renaissance hermeticism, a Greek vase, Rauschenberg's painting, Bottom's dream, a green beetle. Here the world may chime, like a building by Palladio, or disappear on a parting wave as in a film by Bergman. Surprise and truth come together. Things are both ordinary and vivid, distinct and universal. Langley's poems take delight in the sound and sense of language: for him, etymology can be revelation. In the interplay of word and object, each poem attempts an epiphany.
About the Author
R. F. Langley is a retired English and art history teacher. He is the author of Collected Poems, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize and was an honored recommendation by the Poetry Book Society.