Peter Riley

texts

Material Soul
poem from Sett Two

principal publications

Love-Strife Machine (Ferry Press, 1969)
The earliest poems, somewhat American-influenced, of diurnal life in towns.
The Linear Journal (Grosseteste Press, 1973)
Big sequence based on school trips to Spain and Italy.
Lines on the Liver (Ferry Press, 1981)
Prose and poem meditations from the central hills of England.

Tracks and Mineshafts (Grosseteste Press, 1983)
Prose and poetry meditating on the inhabited landscape and its history.
Distant Points. Excavations Part One (Reality Street Editions, 1995)
Experimental prose poems using archaeological excavation reports of burial mounds, and fragments of old lyrics.
Snow has Settled [… ] Bury Me Here (Shearsman Books, 1997) Collection of more sustained and direct pieces, most of them sonnet-like.
Passing Measures (Carcanet, 2000)
Selected poems 1966-1996.
Messenger Street (Poetical Histories, 2001)
A pamphlet containing four elegies for the poet Douglas Oliver
The Dance at Mociu (Shearsman, 2003)
Pose pieces concerning Tranyslvania
Alstonefield: a poem (Carcanet, 2003)
The Gig (Toronto) issue 4/5, 2000, is devoted to studies of Riley’s poetry, plus an interview and bibliography.

forthcoming 2004--

Excavations (complete) (Reality Studios)

for the latest work see--
Masthead website, issue 6. http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/current/sett.html
Jacket website, issue 21. http://jacketmagazine.com/21/riley.html

biographical note

Peter Riley was born 1940, Stockport, near Manchester, in an environment of working people, and entered higher education through Britain’s post-war socialistic educational policies. He read English at Cambridge and has since lived and worked in UK and abroad in various kinds of teaching and casual employment. Since 1985 he has lived in Cambridge, where he operates a mail-order poetry book business. He has written studies of Jack Spicer, T.F. Powys, improvised music, poetry, lead mines, burial mounds, village carols and Transylvanian string bands, and has published two books of translations from the French poet Lorand Gaspar. He also edited the poetry of Nicholas Moore (1918-1986).

The writing occupies a range between quite disjunctive and figuratively far-fetched modes, and a more conversant discourse in standard syntax, tending recently to occupy a middle position between these. A lot of it has been concerned with places visited, real and imaginary, as leverage onto possible modes of attaching the fullest reality. Latterly this has become concentrated on the Peak District of England, and Transylvania, both of which are visited as frequently as possible. Music and archaeological documentation have also been used, at various times and in various ways, as a grounding to poetical meditation. Sequences or accumulations of poems are viewed as more fruitful, more open to world conditions, than the single short poem. No theories of subliminal reading are entertained--the poetry departs from immediately recognisable discourse only when it must, in order to reach possibilities not otherwise accessible. In the end (and only in the end) poetry is an entertainment.

contact

priley@DIRCON.CO.UK

last updated November 11, 2006

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