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Raking Light

Eric Langley

Raking Light Cover
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Categories: 21st Century, British
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (136 pages)
(Pub. Apr 2017)
9781784103323
£9.99 £8.99
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Apr 2017)
9781784103330
£7.99 £7.19
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Shortlisted for The Felix Dennis (Forward) Prize for Best First Collection 2017

    Raking Light
    is Eric Langley’s début 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. ... read more
    Awards won by Eric Langley Short-listed, 2017 The Felix Dennis (Forward) Prize for Best First Collection  (Raking Light)
    'The word which seems most appropriate to Eric Langley's poems might be glimpses, memories tucked under the hedge, fragmented light.'
    London Magazine


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