THE POET R.F. Langley (1938–2011) was also, privately, a prolific prose writer. Extracts from his journals, which he began in 1969, first appeared in PN Review in 2002. The notes to Langley’s Complete Poems, edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod, cite a number of unpublished journal entries that directly informed the writing of his verse.



1 APRIL 2006

Snowy mountains. White files of small clouds all parallel and stretching out over the Channel from the English coast, then inland over the fields, each cloud with its shadow lagging a little and a little to one side. Odd how they change shape so slowly as they move, holding out their thin texture in curls and fixed gestures, as if they were forgetting what they were doing and had been caught by a thought. Or you can steady yourself and see them in their meteorology – small pieces of cumulus boiled up over the land and carried by the wind, in their parallel streams, out to sea. Plate 2. Forms of Cumulus. The result of convection, heated ground from morning sunlight, thermals rise to, and through, their condensation level. Their duller fringes are the evaporating parts, held up as they disappear, slowly, whiter tops, very white and still sharp and confident for a while. Miniature events, risen, and now falling away, filing away, back to where we are coming from. England is warm. I read on the plane, my head falling forward again and again as I sleep. The neat little Fontana Modern Master on Freud by ...