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Aria with Small Lights, Peter Riley, West House Books,
40 Crescent Road, Nether Edge, Sheffield, S7 1HN.

This pamphlet contains a single poem covering ten pages. It is similar in style to Riley’s long poem ‘Alstonefield’ recently published by Carcanet. The poem has thirty-one stanzas of nine or ten lines each. There is rhyming across stanzas, so that some of the end-words rhyme with corresponding lines in the next or previous stanza. In the poem, the narrator approaches a graveyard at night, and sees that it is full of light, or points of light; each stanza ends with him about to enter it, but not actually doing so. So nothing actually happens, and instead, we are let in on a series of musings and meditations. This circular technique (Riley: ‘I’m interested in a poetry that
has nothing to lean on’) means that the poem is thrown back on the language; it is, in a sense, ‘pure poetry’, and on that level it works extremely well.

One of the set-pieces that Riley plays with is the convention of the meditation-in-a-graveyard; the starting point for both ‘Alstonefield’ and this poem. It starts with:

    At an ordinary life I walked one night
    on the high ridge top, Vitiana, great valley
    of the Serchio, north of Lucca

In these first lines we have conventional first-person monologue; but the phrase ‘at an ordinary life’ is oddly skewed, and draws attention to itself. This combination of plain statement and self-conscious poetic diction is continued throughout the poem. We are never allowed to forget that we are reading a constructed piece of poetry, and that both the speaker and the language, are in some sense artificial. The ‘I’ in the poem is preromantic, derived more from Cowper or Thomas Gray (who gets a mention) than Wordsworth or Coleridge:

    I walked towards a diagnosis it was a land
    I petitioned to enter at the custom shed but had
    no language, no known history of good at all

The use of convention and artificiality allows Riley to make direct
statements that in another type of poetry would have to be either cloaked in irony, or would be hampered by an attempted realism. Here they have a peculiar force and directness:

For they fell into pride and persecuted immigrants,
who being not yet here and no longer there
regularly get blamed for self hatred…
Such interiorisation of plain
persons lacking cash will turn the earth to ice.

The poem is concerned with, among other things, the individual’s place in society and history. There is also some element of comparison between developed cultures and traditional ones; one of Riley’s current preoccupations. Some of the phrasing, as well as the stanza layout, reminded me of W.S. Graham’s ‘The Nightfishing’:

When I reached the gate in the wall it became further
to what was in front of me than all I had known

and it has that same feeling of a disembodied self searching for identity:

…I wasn’t anyone, I had
no history, some kind of foreigner under a wall.

Peter Riley has been producing top-notch poetry for many years, and it’s good that he is now published by Carcanet; but that only accounts for part of his output, and you should look out for small press publications like this. It’s worth the effort to seek out this poetry: it is literary, intellectual, poised and finely balanced; but it manages to combine these attributes with plain speech and a welcoming approach to the reader. A rare combination.