Wrote a mid-length review for a US poetry magazine; the editor has been
mysteriously silent about it for a bit, so I'm not sure whether or not it's
going to run, & in any case I doubt the magazine would be seen by many UK
readers. So, since I think the book in question would be of interest to
some people here, I'll paste in the review below. So I have it in a file
here by chance I'll also toss in "Man Jack" at the end in full, which might
give a sense of Langley's style & skill to those unacquainted with his
work. -- all best --N
Nate & Jane Dorward
[log in to unmask]
THE GIG magazine: http://www.geocities.com/ndorward/
109 Hounslow Ave., Willowdale, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada
ph: (416) 221 6865
----
R.F. Langley, Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet/infernal methods, 2000.
72pp. £6.95. 1-8575-448-X.
R.F. Langley occupies a slightly anomalous position in the UK small-press
scene. Born in 1938, he belongs to the generation of J.H. Prynne, Andrew
Crozier, Peter Riley and other poets associated with the 1960s mimeo
worksheet The English Intelligencer, and with the Ferry and Grosseteste
Presses; this is the group rather imprecisely known as the first generation
of a "Cambridge school", of which Prynne is the most celebrated member. Yet
Langley did not publish any work in the Intelligencer, nor was he included
in the defining group-anthology A Various Art (1987); his poetry instead
eventually appeared under the auspices of a second, younger generation of
Cambridge authors, his first two collections Hem (1978) and Sidelong (1981)
being published by Nigel Wheale and David Trotter's infernal methods press,
and other poems appearing in Rod Mengham and John Wilkinson's magazine
Equofinality.
Langley's small and concentrated oeuvre--17 poems, 66 pages--divides neatly
into two phases: the first, published 1979-85, comprises the first eleven
poems of this volume (though presented out of chronological order), the
second, published 1994-98, takes in the next five poems, a suite interlinked
through their enigmatic protagonist Jack, and through the distinctive
cross-weave of syllabic and iambic versification that Langley had first
experimented with in 1985's "Mariana"; "The Night Piece" (1999) serves as a
charming two-page coda to the collection. The earlier group is to my mind
Langley's core achievement, and deserves to ensure him the attention so far
reserved for more celebrated figures like J.H. Prynne, Allen Fisher or Tom
Raworth; of the later poems, none of the four sequels quite measures up to
the original "Man Jack" (1994), one of Langley's signature pieces.
While my invocation of Prynne and the Cambridge school will have rightly
suggested to the reader familiar with the area that Langley is a demanding
and often difficult author--though there are exceptions, such as the
delightful, Stevens-like "Mariana"--such a designation requires some
qualification. For Langley's work does not essay the leaps of idiom or
reference typical of the later Prynne and Wilkinson--their attempt to convey
the entanglement of the perceiving and knowing subject in the pressures of
this world by drawing on the jargon and special knowledges of the sciences,
politics, economics, pop culture and so forth. The pervading feeling in
Langley is one of calm and meditation; the natural world, its shifting
light, birds, insects, spiders and plants, is a constant resource:
And, looking out, she might
have said, 'We could have all
of this,' and would have meant
the serious ivy
on the thirteen trunks, the
ochre field behind, soothed
passage of the cars, slight
pressure of the sparrow's
chirps--just what the old glass
gently tested, bending,
she would have meant, and not
a dream ascending.
("Mariana", p.7)
But if the poetry is grounded in an intense attentiveness to experience its
most characteristic move is to at once engage in meditative
self-reflexiveness, and show how such self-consciousness eventually pushes
the speaker to the side. The poems are often written in series of short
sentences, forming an array of observations, questions, replies and
statements that follow in abrupt succession and often without obvious
relation to one another; the effect is not to erase one's sense of a speaker
(in favour of an abstract textuality) but to give one the impression of a
speaker responding to or caught up in more powerful or abstract forces.
Human figures are present in the poetry but are not in control, are often
slightly absurd; there is a blurring of the boundaries between human and
nonhuman, with figures like the "eight absurd captains" of "The Upshot"
ambiguously _half_-animated. In an interview published in Angel Exhaust
Langley explains that the "captains" are ornamental bench-ends in a Suffolk
church. This is not at all obvious from the poem itself, but it is clear
enough that the captains are not quite human beings, remaining immobile yet
somehow full of life:
The captains have not moved though
earlier the peep of day had staked
everything on the ear and shoulder
of just one of them. But soon he was
smoothly snubbed like the other seven.
Now the individual is unimportant but
eight determined men stand penniless,
never a glance, in the silver evening.
(p.11)
Similar acts of animation or half-animation occur in most of the poems here,
sometimes in quite complex fashion, as in the punning transformations of
"Juan Fernandez", where a "print on the bar"--initially it seems the ring of
moisture left by a jug of ale on a bar, or an actual framed print--becomes
the footprint discovered by a startled Robinson Crusoe. (Juan Fernandez was
the island on which Alexander Selkirk, the model for Crusoe, was marooned.)
Such acts of transformation sometimes result in a beguilingly abstract
lyricism, produced by the continual displacement of the speaker as he seems
to become part of some larger process, as in the opening lines of "The
Ecstasy Inventories":
We slow out and curve
then the deep lawlike
structures loom and bob
through. We sway up, shut
down and open, coolly, each
small hour. Quiet. Then
quieter still. When thin
rims of rose and powder-blue
start slightly and a marble
runs down a chute.
This mode in Langley might be usefully compared to certain aspects of J.H.
Prynne's work, especially in The White Stones (1969); one might think of the
abstracted lyricism of "Moon Poem", or the mysterious opening of "Star
Damage at Home":
The draft runs deeper now and the motion
relaxes its hold, so that I pass freely from
habit to form and to the sign complete
without unfolding--the bright shoots in the
night sky or the quick local tremor of leaves.
(Poems [1999], p.108)
Prynne's "I" in The White Stones, whether lyrical or embattled, is more in
control than in Langley, but there's a kinship in the way human experience
becomes figured in terms of nonhuman motion and process.
There is much else that could be said of these strange and remarkable poems,
but it seems to me most important to register the fineness of Langley's ear
and the impact of his prosody. His verse somehow manages to combine the
disparate prosodies of Olsonian free-verse (one poem here, "Matthew Glover",
is evidently quite early and shows a firm grasp of projective verse
technique), blank verse and syllabic verse; they are drawn together by
Langley's chiming patterns of rhyme and assonance, which draw on the example
of Hopkins even if they are more understated. The different prosodies are
each played off against the other, as in the remarkable "Man Jack", a poem
whose protagonist is an animation of the OED's disparate entries for the
word "jack":
So Jack's your man, Jack is your man in things.
And he must come along, and he must stay
close, be quick and right, your little cousin
Jack, a step ahead, deep in the hedge, on
edge, a kiss a rim, at pinch, in place, turn
face and tip a brim, each inch of him, the
folded leaf, the important straw. What for.
He's slippery and hot. He slides in blood.
Those lies he tells you, running alongside. ...
(p.51)
Such hybrid prosody has appeared elsewhere in "Cambridge" poetry--most
prominently in Michael Haslam, whose Continual Song unexpectedly merges free
verse and the resources of rhyme and iambic rhythms; one might also cite
certain poems of Peter Riley and Andrew Crozier. In North America there
have been some attempts to work in syllabics--in Lisa Robertson's Debbie: An
Epic, for instance. Langley's handling of the form is one of the most
convincing I've come across.
I have only scratched the surface of a complex and demanding book of poems.
Readers with access to an academic library will want to consult the
selection in PN Review 100 of two of Langley's poems--"Juan Fernandez" and
"Mariana"--accompanied by an authorial note. There is also a very useful
interview inconveniently split between Angel Exhaust 13 and 14: it is
invaluable for Langley's elaboration of some of the biographical and
literary sources for the poems, but should only be read after the poems have
made their impact. They stand on their own; for many years the province of
only a small number of readers, they are now revealed through this collected
edition as key achievements of the UK's modernist poetry underground.
Nate Dorward, 8 Aug 00
-----
>From R.F. Langley, _Collected Poems_:
MAN JACK
For Jane Williams and Bob Walker
So Jack's your man, Jack is your man in things.
And he must come along, and he must stay
close, be quick and right, your little cousin
Jack, a step ahead, deep in the hedge, on
edge, a kiss a rim, at pinch, in place, turn
face and tip a brim, each inch of him, the
folded leaf, the important straw. What for.
He's slippery and hot. He slides in blood.
Those lies he tells you, running alongside.
To and fro he ducks, and miserably
clicks and puckers up, and in his rage he
won't speak out, or only half. He's short. He's
dim. He'll clench his jaw. He's more than you can
take. He'll drop it all across the road and
spit and go. Over the years you'll have to
learn to pull him in and let him know. You'll
say, 'Today we'll have that, now, those other
apples. So. Oh but you'll fetch them like I
seem to think I dreamed you did, and they'll be
like they always should have been, in action,
apples in the apples, apples' apples,
through and through.' And then you'll see what he can
do. He'll fetch them in and put them roughly
in a row. The scent will almost be a presence
in the room. 'Oh, but it hurt,' he'll say, 'to
pick across the stones, the different stones.
So many different pains.' Oh Jack. You
hick. You grig. You hob. You Tom, and what not,
with your moans! Your bones are rubber. Get back
out and do it all again. For all the
world an ape! For all the world Tom poke, Tom
tickle and Tom joke! Go back and carry
logs into the hall. And wait with lifted
finger till the cave drops fall. Your task. The
jewel discovered by the monkey in
the shine. Fetch that, and make it much, and mine.
Sometimes it's best if I forget to ask.
An errand boy with nothing up his sleeve,
who stops to listen to the rigmarole
to find he cannot leave without he's bought
the dog. Time out of mind. Just bring
what you can find. Apples. Twigs. Icicles.
Pigs. The owl that watches as we try a
phonecall from the isolated box. Jane's
disembodied voice. The owl that hears her
words. The moon that thinks about her baby.
Jack in the moon. Jane in Jill. The baby
coming sure and soon and bright and staring
at the apples which keep still. The owl had
no idea. More knew Tom fool. The apples
shine in everybody's eyes. Tom speaks
inside his cheeks. The moon talks from inside
his belly. The isolation sighs to think
of motherhood. We hear Jane's tiny words,
as does the owl, astonished, listening
in the roadside wood. Jack gleeks inside
his only box of tricks for what has come.
All thumbs, he Tibs his Tom. It's apples and
it's owls. He bobs and chops and nips until
it's Jill engaged in paradise, with the
enchanted pips. Just in the nick with
only magic left. No use at all to
look at him as if he were a jug. As
if he were. A twig is evidently
a love bouquet. The apples are a gift.
The spellbound owl sits round as such
upon a shelf. Its silence cries out loud
as if you touched it on a wound. It is
embarrassed and delighted with what Jack
has found. And that it had, itself, the wit
required to secretly decipher it.
Until there is a sudden dip into
a silence in the silence, and the owl
has turned his head away and, frightened, stepped
off on his long legs into air, into
an emptiness, left by Jack who is not
there. He's gone too far. Though nothing drops, there's
nothing caught. The twig is two. The gleek is
three. There'd be a mournival in the four
but no one's counting any more. It stops.
The apple is not fire. And yellow is
not sweet. Jane's voice from miles away is just
a speck and almost lost, but yet it is
distinctly Jane, uninfluenced by the moon
she has not seen, the roadside where she has
not been, the owl who thought to pick a peck,
the apples she will never eat. The Jane
who cannot tell us yet the baby's name.
And, undeclared like that, it wins the game.
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