Tuesday 27 January 2015

RF Langley

On Twitter yesterday, Jeremy Noel-Tod linked to his obituary, from The Times, for poet RF Langley, who died four years ago.

It's an excellent piece, and reminded me that Langley is a poet I need to read more of. What I have read I've liked a lot. Anyone else out there a fan?

2 comments:

Henry said...

I read 'Mariana' in Michael Schmidt's Harvill anthology as an undergraduate, and I don't think I've ever quite got that rhythm out of my head. I recently had a conversation about him with John Clegg; we were discussing 'Matthew Glover', which John reckons one of his best poems. I think it's great, but in some ways it's so atypical of him that I feel there's almost a backhanded compliment in singling it out. There's going to be a new Collected coming out with Carcanet later this year, which will add The Face of It, subsequent uncollected poems, and unpublished ones, to the (much earlier) Collected. It'll be a great chance to go back over the whole oeuvre – which still probably won't be that big, relatively speaking.

Matt Merritt said...

Ah, thanks Henry - I'll put that Collected on my 'to buy' list, then, sounds terrific.