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, and moths,which flinch/ along the hedge then turn in/ to hide, are Yellow Shells not/ Shaded Broad-bars, or ” RF Langley mused in the final poem he published during his lifetime,the provocatively titled “To a Nightingale”: two pages before it, “ants finish collect confetti, and wrestling/ grains of rice into cracks.” whether you find such painstaking,ant-like observation compelling, you will find much to like, or something to esteem,in the subtleties, introverted ruminations, or sometime flashes of clarity that make up most of Langley’s total Poems.
Langley taught secondary school English (in Wolverhampton and Sutton Coldfield) for decades,and there is something of a splendid 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, and moths and teasels,to English pub interiors and Venetian edifices, the same kind of scrutiny that art historians bring to real brushstrokes, or 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 revelationsContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com