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Raking Light

  • ISBN-13: 9781784103323
  • Publisher: CARCANET PRESS
    Imprint: CARCANET PRESS
  • By Eric Langley
  • Price: AUD $24.99
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 20/07/2017
  • Format: Paperback (216.00mm X 135.00mm) 176 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: Poetry by individual poets [DCF]
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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'.
Dr Eric Langley (BA hons, MA dist, PhD: Leeds) was awarded his PhD in 2003, and since then has taught at the Universities of Leeds, York, St Andrews, Sheffield, and Royal Holloway. Having previously been a Teaching Fellow at UCL, Eric returned in 2014 as Lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature. Eric's monograph, Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, was published by Oxford University Press in November 2009. He is the son of award-winning poet R.F. Langley who died in 2011.
Son of beloved poet R.F. Langley Shakespearean scholar, Langley explores verbal experimentation, etymology and semanticsTitle taken from the art-conservation technique of 'raking light' where an oblique beam is thrown across the surface of a picture plane to reveal its textures, overlays and deteriorationLangley 'dissects' words to discover their true significance and lost meaningsQuestions the communicative limits of language and its ability to articulate strong emotion
'How often, when reading another's work, does a poet think: I wish I'd written that?' - Adam Crothers
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