April Eye
Peter Riley’s website

 

 

The picture is by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004): “Glacier Knot”, mixed media/ink/card, 1978. She lived in St Ives, Cornwall from 1940 and was to my eyes as good an artist as anyone else there. It is used as a cover through the generous cooperation of the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust.

The book is published by Carcanet Press, and includes:
— The Gacial Stairway and five other long poems or sequences, each with helpful introduction
— 12 individual poems 2008-2010
— A prose-poem detailing a walk from Kings Cross Station to the School of Oriental and African Studies
— 59 prose pieces detailing a trip to western USA in 2007 followed by 59 very short poems derived from these pieces.

 
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Most of the items on this site are commentaries on, extensions of, or revisions of, published works, and won’t mean much to anyone who doesn’t have the original texts to hand. There is also an amount of bibliography and an autobiographical essay on my early life.

Below are three short poems. The first two date from the 1980s and are included in the anthology The Ground Aslant: an anthology of radical landscape poetry edited by Harriet Tarlo (Shearsman Books 2011). I put them here because they seem to have pleased various critics and academics but also people not themselves involved in poetry, which is always a rewarding thing. The second was set for choir by Mary Taylor and performed by Women of Note of Cambridge. The third is new and unpublished. The places where they take place are (1) fields near Belper Derbyshire (2) The roof terrace of a house in a village in Provence (3) My back garden.

 

PRELUDE
 

Snow has settled in the lines
Of an old ridge-and-furrow system
Striping the gently sloping dark
Green fields, engrossed script
Of duration, repetition, authority
At which that calm baby in the self
That finds it so difficult to speak
Lowers an eyelid on the shrinking day
And suddenly says outright
The entire brochure of love and all.
Stay here before you fall.
 

****
 

ROOFWATCH (1)
 

Day and night the sky arches over
hills and plain turning against
the earth, clouds springing
from the dark wooded edge fan
over the farmed land and at
night the plethora of stars
turns clear and sure and
compact in their terraces
above a veiled and separated ground.
O fine in their farming the stars
rally and exit all night.
 

****
 

REVERDY
 

Stars between the black branches
          a rustling in the hedge
          silently, the wall collapses
and the house behind me where you sleep
                        in the loft
my hand reaching out at night will never
          meet you
                         except in a grandchild
the stars fluttering in the tree-tops future toys.
 

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Biography

News

Picture

The Books: retrospective and texts

Bibliography and notes (a) Peter Riley

Bibliography (b) Poetical Histories

Unpublished or uncollected essays:
        Dawn Songs
        Tall Tales of the Newcastle Poetry Revolution

Notes to Aria with Small Lights

Notes to Poems to Pictures by Jack B. Yeats

Commentary on Ospita

After-notes to The Dance at Mociu

Reader. Lecture. Author. – a new text

Unpublished or uncollected poetry:
        Shadowy Waters
        Whistling Sands

Nicholas Moore:
        Note
        The Orange Bed (.pdf file, 49kb)
 

This site last updated 14th December 2012.

All content on these pages is Copyright
© Peter Riley, 2007-2012, unless otherwise stated.

Web design by Peter Manson.