R F Langley: Beyond the Indigo Gate

The Blue Gate by David Johnson

R F Langley, an English poet, passed away in January this year. During his life he had two collections of poems published. The first, Collected Poems, was nominated for the Whitbread Prize for poetry in 2000. The second, The Face of It, has been described as "one of the classics of early 21st century English poetry". Never heard of him? I hadn't either until last week, when I was asked to write a review of an audio CD of his readings for the Poetry Book Society. In doing so I discovered some of the most exciting, complex and profoundly beautiful poetry I have read. Because none of his work is available to read online, I have transcribed one of my favourite poems, Achilles, for you to have a look at, which I highly recommend you do. You can find the poem, along with the full review of his work below.

Achilles

One is seldom directed by way of

an indigo gate. A life is plunged in

colours, saturations, shades, tints, hues. One

screws one’s eyes up. A medieval list

of inks confuses fuscum pulvernum

with azure from the mines of Solomon. 

Who knows what perse is? Days lose themselves in

pandia omnia and dip away

between the pinks and blues. But then there is

alizarin which sometimes jumps from the 

old leaves. And turquoise is a stone dropped near

the gamboge fence. Who did not notice those?

And shapes. The tree. It shows what one could call

constraint. It bursts through rocks in calluses

that clog in a lump with several

branches lunging out of it, one knot-hole

and a stump. The thing has corners to it,

pockets, ledges, wedges, all choked in with

lichen on them, found out by the sun that

stabs don from the right, detecting olive

green.

In sixteen-thirty-three, when she was

twenty-five, on a creamy marble slab

in the south aisle, they drew Elizabeth

Havers. Did she have time to walk out past

a red house? Choose a brush? Paint a picket

white? Step on by? Turn round, look back, and shout

that she could see what it might mean? That that

was the place where she had been? She is a 

whisper. Smoke and cream. What had she really

seen? She rolls her eyes and wears her shroud so

that it does not cover her lace cuff.

The

kylix has been cracked. The mend in it spoils

his cheek-piece and his mouth, but there is still

his eye, under the helmet’s rim, as he

stabs her from the right. She reaches up to

touch his chin. BC. Four-sixty. Killing

Penthesileia. It is his last and

only chance to stare at her. He does so

and he falls in love. Or is it lust or

scorn? Furious concentration? Don’t call

it blue. Not blue. The gate is indigo. 

She is engraved on her stone slab. The aisle

window moves its print onto her face. It 

stresses her lips, almost rubbed out, and the

scoring of her thick curls. Her tear-ducts. The

look she is giving to her left, which might

be sad because she is remembering 

what? Ten minutes of after-glow, when white

campion seemed distilled against grey grass,

the poppy in the crop, alight, red for

itself, and she stood stupefied by that,

hoping the hero had not seen her yet. 

If she had lived she would be sixty-five.

Sir Isaac Newton, in a dark room, pins

his paper, sets his prism twenty-two

feet off, and asks a friend, who has not thought

about the harmony of tones in sounds

and colours, if he will mark each hue at

its most brisk and full. If he can, also, 

postulate, along the insensible 

gradation, the edges of the seven. 

Where blue ends. Where the violet begins.

The pencil in hand. The hand and the pencil

are suddenly intensely indigo. 

The gate is indigo, but when they give

directions people call it blue. To lose

the way is to remember something of

the stump. But can anyone be ready

for the moment when the dusk ignites the

poppy? Or accept that the spectral hand

is his? That it’s he must keep the pencil

steady? Maybe everyone is dazzled

here by simultaneous death and love?

This morning in

the pool at

Lime Kiln Sluice

a heron wades and

his deliberations are

proposing ripples

which reflect on

him, run silver

collars up his

neck, chuckles his

chin, then thin to

sting the silence

where he points

his beak.

His round

and rigid ye.

Perhaps he knows 

he is caressed.

Born in 1938 in Rugby, Warwickshire, Langley only came into poetry relatively late into his life. He attended Jesus College Cambridge, and later went on to teach history of art and English literature at secondary school level. Retiring to Suffolk in the latter period of his life, he began publishing his work in small periodicals and anthologies before being picked up by Carcanet, with whom he published two collections of poems, 2007’s The Face of It, and the earlier Collected poems (2000), for which he was nominated for the Whitbread Award. He also kept a journal throughout his life, extracts of which were published in the PN Review, and later collated and published in a book by Shearsman Press. In its intensity, brevity, and critical acclaim, his short career as a poet surely verges on the miraculous. The work itself certainly does. 

The themes of his work are at once universal and deeply personal; love, loss, the exploration of the self, of the self in nature, and of nature itself. If this all sounds too vast and grandiose, have patience, this is writing that rewards. If nothing else, Langley’s ear for music, and the wit of his rhyme are worth pursuing:

 “Descartes was wrong/The decision to sing is/the first note of the song”. The language is kaleidoscopic; charged with light and sound and colour, they refract and reflect the world as he sees it: 

“…A life is plunged in/colours, saturations, shades, tints, hues. One/screws one’s eyes up. A medieval list/of inks confuses fuscum pulvernum/with azure from the mines of Solomon.”

It is also a work that is richly informed, teeming with allusion. There are shapes of Wordsworth in the clouds of The Bellini in San Giovanni Crisostomo. Blues for Titania stirs the silt of Pound, and throughout the collection there is allegory of Shakespearean heights.  Underlying all this however, there is a modernity to his writing too, a microscopy of detail and a near surgical precision that cannot fail to astound. In Still Life with Wineglass, he dissects the scene to reveal what it consists of; not just ‘a wineglass of water on/the windowsill’ but the ‘gale of sunlight’ in which it stands, and the ‘undamaged thistle seed/caught on its rim’. And, tracking back, tracing with a gloved finger the path of the teasel, he finds the finch that released it, and how, amongst others, it drifted like ‘parachutes/whispering away/Milk and magenta.’ 

Langley reads with a measured cool. Likely helped by his career as a teacher, he delivers without presumption. He guides us through the poems, lifting up the rhymes up for us to get a better look at, or slowing down to point out the hidden details lest we should hurry past and miss them. This is poetry of the finest order, and it is no overstatement to say that Langley deserves to be remembered as one of the great original voices of the 21^st Century.