Eyewear is pleased to welcome Peter Riley (pictured) this Friday. Riley was born in 1940 near Manchester, read English at Cambridge, worked at the University of Odense (Denmark) for several years and has since subsisted by casual teaching of various kinds and bookselling, first in the Peak District of central England and then Cambridge, where he ran a small press and collaborated in organising international poetry events until retiring in 2005. His website is at http://www.aprileye.co.ukHis other recent books are The Dance at Mociu [Transylvanian travel sketches] Shearsman Books 2003, Excavations [prose poems] Reality Street Editions 2004, and The Llyn Writings and The Day’s Final Balance (uncollected writings 1968-2006), both newly published by Shearsman. A selected poems, Passing Measures was published by Carcanet in 2000.
These are the first four poems of a sequence situated in a mediaeval hermit’s cave in a wood in Derbyshire. Each poem in the sequence begins by paying attention to a 15th Century crucifix carved in the wall of the cave.
Crucifix and lamp niche carved in the wall
quiet breathing slowly devolving thought
wine corks and olive pips in the ash heap
soft singing, dry powder, global home.
Prevent me from disheartening, spread
my thought into result seal my song
in a small pot my heel turning on the ground
at the centre, where the sky sits.
Night closes in, heat lifts from the valley floor
the stars reappear, the grasses part
and they enter the earth, the sung men.
The traders, burdened with a constant elsewhere.
––––––––––––––––––––––
Crucifix and oil stoup
in the gritstone wall
a floating wick, turning
shadows. The book
sings itself into the sack of grain
the owl at the door
and the washing-up to be done.
Gladly, willingly, free of guilt
free of not-guilt, fixing
sequences across
distant points, where
shadows gather, where
the living trade, and sing
their lives into the earth.
Everything I do is that song’s descant.
The broken pot in the grave
outside the front door
what you might wish to become:
shadows on the sea,
stronghold sure.
––––––––––––––––––––––
Cross and cup scooped
in the living stone
in the earth, elsewhere.
For equity, for spread of gain
raise the white stone, the red
light on the shore where
the merchant ship rounds the headland
Two pale lines on the ground
over the hill’s shoulder
the returning workman catches
the song in the night
from the wooded hillside
a faint light among the trees,
owl and badger signalling
beyond their species.
Intimately, in the village, turn
the dance, the baby’s head towards.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––
Face gazing down, rush-light flame
marking eyebrows, inscribed into
the material as if through it,
from somewhere else.
Singing teacher, from somewhere else,
come and sing to me
down the ploughed fields
where the lapwings gather,
the incline, sing to me the elsewhere,
the outcome,
make it plain for all.
The incline, the outcome, I
mislaid a life. But a small light among foliage
strikes the happy lads on the way home,
slowly falling to earth.
From A Map of Faring published by Parlor Press, West Lafayette, 2005, http://www.parlorpress.com
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