Raking Light

Shortlisted for The Felix Dennis (Forward) Prize for Best First Collection 2017

Raking Light is Eric Langley’s début collection of poems. Characterized 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’.

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.