Peter Riley's Greek Passages (2009)

In the quotations that follow, the slashes are not line breaks, but punctuation the author's inserted in prose poems, because that's how Peter Riley rolls in Greek Passages (Shearsman Books, 2009). As all the poems are untitled, know that each new passage comes from a separate poem.

Small chirruping cries, echoed along the coastal cliffs.

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Our sustenance dragged across our fear....

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The light of our souls downcast / onto the stones of the shore / Money, what have you done?

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Wake into fallen dark / the labyrinth cut into the open

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...when I / catch that music, / tuned to the distant hurt, the small voice.

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I don't make a narrative, I / await an arrival, a song.

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Coachloads arrive wanting to buy something / something redemptive, though it might not last. / / Up in the windy hills the rain / marginalises us, serving / every cell of the landscape.

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Justice that survives in the tales while the actuality lies ten feet down a shaft grave. There was no justice.

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The mind is a cold and lonely place, its doors locked. Outside in the moving air is where things happen.... / / The orange butterflies speckled black or brown, that vanished with the first rain.

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But there is an immediacy, a smoking chimney, somebody looks up from the news. The singing is unstoppable. A gecko runs across the wall-o.

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We are reduced to a single moment, a shout of denial, a syllable in the night. Then we are finished.

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The clear picture, the better articulation, the linear spread. Lord it is lonesome among poor remnants of success, struggling to recognise the world.

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The answering, the brightened heart, a refuge because a resource, and a resilience, a burgeoning, a dazzling sanity.

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...look / at it there, the plurality shining in the night / seeking questions for its answers. 

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...the secular complexity devolving on hope / the lyric of everyday....

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Arriving at dawn in the foothills of Taigétos / the dark shapes becoming known, sense / unfolding from the eastward slopes, a little misty, beginning to breathe /

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Whitethroated sea / discursive light / pale red wine holding / a gleam in the glass / Dionysiac calm

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Conversing with the dead at another entrance to Hades, continuous with the sky.

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And lyric redeems narrative, and hand in hand on the edge of the sand . . . / The small boat entering the harbour, turning the engine off, drifting to the quayside, carrying home, by the light of the moon.

Purchase Peter Riley's Greek Passages directly from the publisher, Shearsman Books, here.