VIII
by Peter Riley
NICHOLAS LUDFORD. DEREK BAILEY. RESTLESSNESS AND SERENITY.
and leaps across full ditches.
Wandering all over Europe very much at home
talking singing from shore to shore
gathering the daylight, long straight forest edges
like black cliffs, paths out of the backs of
suburban housing estates across abandoned
coal mine sites, miles of telegraph posts and electricity pylons
some with kestrels’ or storks’ nests on them.
The lines bend to the ground at points of regret For all I rue
and I rue and I rue (she turns her face towards)
Migrant workers, Jewish artists who fled central Europe
longing for home, old or new, remembering the particulars,
the forms and colours of molehills in the family meadow
The lonely desert-man sees the tents of the happy tribes
“Man with brother Man to meet,
And as a brother kindly greet” words
past nations / public words
distant hopes / whispered in the night,
far from the ken of the broadcasters.
“Horo Mhairi dhu, turn ye to me” (in the dance)
(in the dialect) an almost silent message threaded
from shore to shore by mountain and valley
corner shops and multi-storey car-parks, a sustained
assurance that silences the amplifiers.
From Due North. Reproduced with kind permission from Shearsman Books.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Collection 2015
Due North
Peter Riley
About Peter Riley
Peter Riley (b. 1940, Stockport) first encountered poetry as a child through ‘bright schoolteachers introducing us to Eliot and Pound and encouraging exploration, which mostly took place in second-hand bookshops’.
He has more than twenty publications to his name, including studies of burial mounds, village carols, lead mines and Transylvanian string bands: the sheer range of his work defies attempts to pigeon-hole him, although it is relatively safe to say that much of his work engages with landscape, often English, but also French, Italian or Transylvanian.
He studied at Cambridge, and then at the universities of Keele and Sussex and has taught in Denmark: he subsisted as a bookseller for many years and declares on his website that he’d rather be known as ‘writer’ than poet’.
‘I’ve always been nervous of calling myself ‘poet’ since it is something you do rather than something you become. My way of writing has developed through a series of some twenty books, generally in the quest for a wider concept of poetical substance, to get away from a standardised person-centred concept of the poem with its attached restrictions on linguistic usage.’
Due North (Shearsman 2015) was inspired by his move back to the area of his birth. Its themes are displacement and quest: he worked towards it by gathering ‘great deal of thought, research, note-making and fragmentary passages of poetry concerning movements of populations’.
His advice to young poets starting out is: ‘Beware of polemical concepts, which threaten to narrow the poem concept. Get an idea of what you believe in, what a poem by you could be and do it at its best.’
