From moth wings to artists’ brushstrokes, this is work that celebrates the effort of close scrutiny
“This month the lemon, I’ll say/ primrose-coloured, moths, which flinch/ along the hedge then turn in/ to hide, are Yellow Shells not/ Shaded Broad-bars,” RF Langley mused in the last poem he published during his lifetime, the provocatively titled “To a Nightingale”: two pages before it, “ants do collect confetti, wrestling/ grains of rice into cracks.” If you find such painstaking, ant-like observation compelling, you will find much to like, and something to love, in the subtleties, introverted ruminations, and sometime flashes of clarity that make up most of Langley’s Complete Poems.
Langley taught secondary school English (in Wolverhampton and Sutton Coldfield) for decades, and there is something of a good teacher’s patience – along with a veteran teacher’s willing idiosyncrasy – in his ratiocinative moods. “Every brushstroke changes the picture,” Langley wrote in a one-page “Note” on his own work: he brings to wrens, moths and teasels, to English pub interiors and Venetian edifices, the same kind of scrutiny that art historians bring to real brushstrokes, and that he must have brought to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (see his poem “Blues for Titania”) as he guided his teenage students through its revelations
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