Raking Light by Eric Langley

Raking Light by Eric Langley

Shortlisted for The Felix Dennis (Forward) Prize for Best First Collection 2017. Raking Light is Eric Langley's debut collection of poems. Characterised by his rigorous fascination with language's latent etymologies and semantic layers, Langley's poems take their cue from the art conservation technique of 'raking light', in which an oblique beam is thrown across the surface of a picture to expose its textures and overlays. Under raked light, paint reveals its damage and deterioration, its craquelure and canvas-warp, and discloses a backstory of abandoned intentions. With his attentiveness to resonance and echo, Langley picks up on lost meanings and buried contradictions in language, probing its abandoned significances. Finding traces of obscured sense or inarticulacy, his verse picks at words to test their efficacy and authenticity, feeling out their substance, proving their worth. These are poems - elegies, love lyrics - concerned with miscommunication, with intentions gone astray, with loss and the uncertainties inherent in interaction. They are excited and exciting, defusing and detonating by turns the 'hectic honeyed hand-grenades / in amongst your alphabets'.

'How often, when reading another's work, does a poet think: I wish I'd written that?' - Adam Crothers

Eric Langley was born in Lichfield in 1977, and studied English at the University of Leeds. He lectures in Shakespeare at University College London, having previously taught at St Andrews and Royal Holloway. His first academic monograph, Suicide and Narcissism in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, was published by OUP in 2009, and he is completing a second study on Shakespeare and period disease pathology. His poetry has previously appeared in PN Review and Carcanet's New Poetries VI.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781784103323
ISBN 10	1784103322
Title	Raking Light
Author	Eric Langley
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Carcanet Press Ltd
Year published	2017-04-27
Number of pages	136
Prizes	Short-listed for The Felix Dennis (Forward) Prize for Best First Collection 2017
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable