Monday 6 June 2011

R F Langley 1938-2011



On Saturday afternoon the Swedenborg Hall hosted a memorial reading for Roger Langley who died in January. I had the pleasure of hearing him read a couple of years back with Peter Riley at Dulwich College. His slim Collected Poems came out with Carcanet in 2000, and a further volume, The Face of It, appeared from the same publisher in 2007. Shearsman published a selection from his Journals in 2006. These in themselves are extraordinary and apparently only a fraction of the whole. The writing is as good as Gilbert White’s. The reading was evidence enough of the regard in which Langley’s work is held. It featured Jeremy Prynne, Geoff Windle, Peter Riley, Tom Lowenstein, Wendy Mulford, John Welch, Thomas A Clark (read by Andrew Brewerton), Diana Quick, Michael Haslam, Michael Schmidt, Denise Riley, Tony Lopez, Bob Walker, Andrew Brewerton and Helen MacDonald.

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