A bird that isn’t there

Jeremy Noel-Tod

  • Collected Poems by R.F. Langley
    Carcanet, 72 pp, £6.95, January 2001, ISBN 1 85754 448 X

After J.H. Prynne’s weighty Poems (Bloodaxe) surfaced, like the Kraken, in high-street bookshops in 1999, the complete R.F. Langley looked like a pretty small unnumbered polypus in comparison. Prynne and Langley are of an age (in their early sixties) and, superficially, of a school: both are connected with the small-press poetry world centred on Cambridge, which has, since the 1960s, maintained an alternative aesthetic to the poets and poetry associated with Oxford in the same period. Unsympathetically put (or from the Oxford point of view), the aesthetic is obscurity: dislocation of syntax, metaphor, subject, the lyric ‘I’. You signify it, it’s dislocated. Prynne is the pre-eminent exponent of this double-jointed poetry, and a small-scale comparison might suggest R.F. Langley to be a disciple:

you I took, as you
could hardly, with
me if you offer

(Prynne, ‘Word Order’)

O you, O you he
this, she this
here, once, and
again and again

(Langley, ‘Blithing’)

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Vol. 23 No. 3 · 8 February 2001 » Jeremy Noel-Tod » A bird that isn’t there (print version)
Pages 33-34 | 2720 words