Peter Riley's Due North (Shearsman, 2015), third and final selection

My thanks go to Tony Frazer, editor at Shearsman Books, and Peter Riley, for allowing me to post so many quotations. Here's a final round of favourite passages from Riley's new collection:


...they asked us what songs we'd brought with us.

*

We'll evict ourselves when we need to.

*

from "VII. Lateral Spread and Forward March. Erwartung. Préludes."

Apocalypse too is lullaby.  

from IX

That name I was, blown away in cloud as this life must flit

with the winged seed driven under the stone, calling in vain for respite. 

*

Break the lifeline down to the pain and

desire that everyone knows. There is nowhere else. There is nowhere else

to be or speak. The earth enters you back into its folds unsatisfied, there

is no other song; there is only September, when the falling year offers us

everything there is, and teaches us to measure the distance. 

*

A network of bright lines falls over experience, like a field system, breaking

the grip of totality as the wave breaks on the shore or the air on the

mountain side. In and across these polygons we attach principles and

mitigate conflict. It is painful walking downhill on stones with exhausted

calves but script will bear us to the end.

*

Language failed him.

As it fails us all, and we tighten the cord on the tent flap asking sleep

come shine along. 

from "XI. The Ascent of Kinder Scout"

Who comes in the form of a black dove

and flies into the future?

*

How am I to resolve the contradictions? Parts of the brain

close down and the music touches the heart. But to rescue us

We need the mind entire. The mind the place the night the river

the stars the black bird and the wine. We cannot afford wine

Or toffee, or mother's milk. All flesh is as grass but

we can't afford grass. Yours faithfully.

from "XII. Angel Meadow"

Buy this book directly from the publisher here.

Peter Riley's Due North (Shearsman, 2015), second selection

Some favourite passages:


                                       Our old romances return

freshly laundered on the backs of migrant workers

from former colonies and recent war zones.

*

Take me into a war

where the compass point searches for the heart

and a continent gathers around a companionship of respite.

*

There is too much poetry, it infiltrates alien discourses.

The financial news is given out in metaphors and stage accents,

and only the initiated know what's happening

*

                                      ...when I consider

the termination of my life the owls call, meaning no harm,

and the northern windows rattle the windows.

A shrinking recess in the dark surface of place

holds such authenticity as is left. This stinking Eden (clarts etc.).

from "IV: Strangers Arriving. Soldiers Returning"

Like leaving school, a sudden cold field,

Yes/no questions: what are you going to be? (c1956)

*

Indeed we know we are nothing, our language is lies

       my sighs, my broken words, the sink of my passion

into inarticulacy, the everyday which is where we live

in which we are trapped

       Gentle shepherd, rain on the window

                 It is an honour.

*

Gentle fold in the hillside where we sit and sing

of the world's lapses....

*

                                                 We are not mad. Reality

is not hidden. We prove it, with our hands, at work, perfectly clean.

A bitter wind in the night, cold and damp infiltrates

the house through the walls

        hope through dreams of fear.

*

...the casual and cynical madness of the press.

*

...on railway bridges in Heaton Norris in wild

                     costumes of the soul with small notebooks....

*

                               We were told

          we were alone and refused to believe it....

*

I like this town                                    "I want to be remembered

I like its nervousness

I like being excluded                          as a blue cloud

I want to be forgotten

and melt back into company              in a white sky"

*

To reach the shining port of our melancholy

                  that levers us into a new world

                            through a darkness with an arch over the entrance

                                         reading "Work Makes You Tired".

from "V: Locospotters"

In sleep "we" is restored to the choral "I"

And the singing can start

the great chant of humanity suddenly unafraid

under contract, rights to offset duties

*

All' mein Wirkin, all' mein Leben

All my working, all my life

All my doing, all my finishing

                 devolves on you

attentive ear, shielded breast.

*

                    Events, lives, spinning into light or dark through dream

The grammar of our quest a squaring

of this spin, lakeside cabin in snow

from "III: Water Songs. Schubert/Goethe.

Mayakovsky the Russian Scarecrow"

You can purchase Due North directly from Shearsman books here.

Peter Riley's Due North (Shearsman, 2015), first selection

Some favourite passages:



                    ...raising the head, learning wisdom

in a form of desire, a distance to be gained, learning to wait,

           absence of question-marks, Orphic stasis.

*

                       ...wood smoke drifting across the fields

         dividing thought                between love and duty

*

Tell me-- how from the vast emptiness of the million words

the short phrase strikes the bone between the eyes,

tell me how the world is altered, so little

tell me as little as possible, tell me falsetto

        tell me all night--


*

Then sustain it, tell me

        what you have, lost or left

        in a language beautifully linked

that you could tell the links one by one

like the links in a silver chain, a silver

        tested and coined, fixed in the moon's side,

                   over the end of the world

and we'll get there, reach

         the flowered arbor, the chambered tomb

                             crawl into it and read the stone

with difficulty (about honour).       Then answer


Where are you from?

*

Tenant farmers above Halifax,

world of clarts and slopstone

and the rain singing in the yard.

from "I: Housman's Question"

And another child is born,
somnolent in white lace
and always welcome (what 
is a sky without a star in it?) 1830s urban
infant mortality rate 50% (what is a sky
without a soul in it?) soul tugging at
soul under a black sky.

*

stations built of overlapping chords, where we

laid our heads on the hard wooden benches and

dreamed our own cathedrals, man woman and child.

from "II: A Lost Patrimony"

...as the year points to the stars chattering

in the morning sky with a lark's clarity, the stars fading away.

*

As I came into this world far from

any centre, pratensis "of the fields" so I

moved out, seeking a hand in darkness as 

a child against the wandering fires in the night fields

learning to breathe in the world's fullness

a single truth, that held a dying hand, far from any centre.

*

...consolation for a life of dread

as death is warmed to.

*

                                                          ...under the kestrel's path we moved

out and back, seasonally or daily,

                                                           going to Marks & Spencer's for a shirt

well beyond the northern limits of the nightingale.

*

...and wafts us out of our indulgences

to the waking place, the narrow cot, the birthing light

                          not far from the duties. Or Elektra's

                          sentence.

from "III: The Generations. The Dispersals. Funeral Duties"

You can purchase Due North directly from Shearsman Books here.