RILEY'S MEASURES

Passing Measures: A Collection of Poems. Peter Riley. Manchester: Carcanet, 2000.
The Poetry of Peter Riley. Edited by Nate Dorward. TorontoSpecial issue of The Gig 4/5 (1999/2000).

Thomas Butler

    Carcanet's publication of Peter Riley's Passing Measures marks another important moment in the recent wave of interest in several British poets who have for too long been accessible only through the small presses. In 1999, Bloodaxe released J. H. Prynne's Poems and Wesleyan UP published Other, an anthology of experimental poetry edited by Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain, both books working to change the pervasive lack of enthusiasm in America for recent British poetry. One's hope is that books like Passing Measures will convince more readers in this country that there is plenty of valuable poetry in Britain and that not all of it is brand new. Peter Riley's first book, Love- Strife Machine, appeared in 1967, and he has been turning out books of poetry steadily ever since.
    Passing Measures is a thin book collecting a nice sampling of his poetry from his first published work to his most recent, Untitled Sequence (1999). It contains in full Sea Watches, Sea Watch Elegies, Between Harbours, and Ospita and takes selections from a fair number of his other works. Riley revised many of the poems and organized them so as to give this book a coherence of its own. This is particularly apparent in the fifth section of the book, which consists of selections from eight previous volumes, where the poems play off of each other and rejoin each other as in conversation. For example, he ends "Clouds and Birds over Wolfscote" by commenting on some literature's tradition of "Omitting to mention / our ungainliness against / the possible gain" (97). The next poem "Boletus under Narrowdale" picks up where he had just left off: "Or only that it is worth writing / for no eyes to see and as dully and / imageless as it comes" (97). Riley's careful placement of poems makes it difficult to close the book and, more importantly, highlights his most pronounced themes.
    Again and again in this book we are able to see clearly what has preoccupied Riley throughout his career. It becomes evident that he is a love poet, not in the romantic sense but more in line with what J. H. Prynne had in mind when he wrote that "love is, always, the / flight back / to where / we are." This is love with an ethical charge, constantly asking how can we ive justly in a world of pain and loneliness. The final stanza of "S. Cecilia in Trastevere" announces this idea:

I believe in a centre to the wasted life
That is carried before the world and holds love
Through distance and strife to the end of a
Perfect reconciliation however many times
Occluded in failed responses finally standing
Whole and obvious, like an orchard in the rain. (103)

This is the hope that guides much of Riley's poetry, though most of his work deals with the distance and strife we encounter in our ordinary lives. The way through difficulty is "the heart- work," which is Riley's active definition of love.

For what is trustworthy in this world
But the heartfold, the construct that endures
Beyond our means, the weight and stability
Of the living transcript as the last night stalls. (19)

Love is a movement beyond ourselves as we respond to a call in the world. In this movement, we cast our familiar selves aside and encounter uncertainty: "Love is where centres meet" (40). What makes Riley's poetry so rich is his description of this ambiguous meeting because though "centres meet," they "agree to become unstable" (41). Hard love, to be sure, but that is the shining hope of human life.
In a prose-poem called "Slow Meditation in the Café-Bar Les Caves du Mont Anis, Le Puy," Riley addresses the feeling that runs throughout this volume: "Sometimes a feeling comes on me saying that to love the very savour of human being is such a rare thing, to love a kind of savour or centre of what we are, which is an ordinary thing but the only truth we wholly know, the only fullness without interference, our own stake in time: the person being here" (82). This feeling is an offer that the poet must welcome and respond to by making verse: "Craftily glossing the past into trust via forgetting it rather precariously opens the future through its own delicately poised moment and totally assures the hesitant bearer: the end is in sight, minutely, so slight it almost hurts to locate" (83). The writing of trust is a difficult occupation: "A pattern of war. A map of faring" (83). But this is the only way to fare, for Riley, because the call to love is always compounded by absence and distance. Nothing is ever wholly present in this poetry. Notice for example how he balances the opening line of "Resolution and Interdependence": "We are together we are lost" (75). Or in "Escape from our Uncaring," where an attempt to enter into pure light abjures the earth's saving grace:

Mid-day heat at the ochre quarries,
We have pulled the earth aside and left
Ourselves without shadow, with
That dark doubt that saves us" (71).

Love is never a pure enterprise. Even where centers meet, ordinary shadows spur us to act as carefully as possible in this world. This is how Riley closes "Is This Dusseldorf or Kiel?":

So you see there is no solution, this web
Of tensions is what we are going to live in,
Into the future; to talk of breaking it
Is to damage more than us; it is what
Also we act by, and with, raising
Messages to the ends of the earth holding
Intact each working space. A spreading
Light moves to the land's edge.

Where a ship is always waiting. (94)

    Riley's language remains faithful to this ethical charge by entrenching itself squarely within the possibilities of finitude. A poem originally published in Love-Strife Machine begins: "I am from language and will return to language / and no one will know / what else I might have been" (87). Language itself has to struggle with the lacuna at the center of life. In "The Creative Moment of the Poem," an essay in Denise Riley's Poets on Writing, Britain, 1970-1991 (1992), Peter Riley says that the poem is like a large object between poet and reader that both creates and thwarts communication. Poetic language prevents the reader from simply walking away with the poet's thoughts. Rather, poetry, "does not create or condition a field of any action other than its own. It ignores almost everything. It brings a plurality of event and condition, a crossing of pasts and present, through to a truth which both has and is a central point and requires no other guarantor than itself, the authenticity residing in impartial verbal acts of recognition." (95). Riley's willingness to allow his language to remain in the natural and unalienable inheritance.' What we are" (The Poetry of Peter Riley, 136). We are and belong to what is just beyond ourselves, and it is the poet's job to find language for this uncertain condition.
    Sutherland's essay is one of several excellent pieces collected in a special issue of The Gig, entitled The Poetry of Peter Riley (available by e-mailing Nate Dorward: ndorward@sprint.ca). This special issue is notable because it is the only collection to date that focuses on Riley alone. All of the contributors, many of whom are poets themselves, write in an enviable fair-minded way without using much theory-heavy language. For the most part, they write on single volumes, some of which are not represented in Passing Mesaures, like the fairly recent Distant Points (1995) and Alstonefield (1995). John Hall's 1984 essay "On Lines on the Liver and Tracks and Mineshafts" sets the tone for the pieces that follow by inquiring into Riley's sense of subjectivity. The self for Riley is rarely singular: "Lines on the Liver and Tracks and Mineshafts are writings caught up in a sense of the writer's destiny to be in the fullest imaginable sense 'a person,' and in the paradox too that this destiny to be a full person moves within a language that makes of the pronoun 'we' a despairing term, one that has to deflect a whole series of collective meanings" (36). The self is part of history and language and can never slip out of this condition. Yet, there is hope in the face of the ada- mantine materialism of Tracks and Mineshafts, as Peter Middleton points out: "The 'resistance of / matter' is such that only the unremitting work of body and imagination through love and creativity can find the 'stone in the heart' and transmute it, although Riley is insistent that this ethical call to the reader does not just require a decision of will, or some access of passion.... It requires a transformation of the way we inhabit the world conceptually and materially" (56-57). In order to make such a call, however, Riley's poetic subject has to transform himself. Peter Robinson notes that Riley isn't interested in "a desiccating of the human subject" but instead "attempts to sustain the poetic subject on other grounds": "he includes himself in as a vulnerable and damaged part of the material which can find itself in or out of relations with others and things" (72). Riley retains a poetic subject but one who is part of the fabric of a damaged world. Once in this position, the subject is able to take on ethical responsibility by responding to calls from outside for he recognizes that he, in fact, belongs to what is outside of himself.
    In closing, I should note that this special issue of The Gig includes—along with Keith Tuma's interview with Riley—a complete bibliography of everything Riley has published and of everything written on Riley's work. The release of Passing Measures and The Poetry of Peter Riley should attract more readers of this poetry and spur more commentary on a large body of work extending over thirty years. Finally, for those compelled by Riley's poetry, Ireland's Wild Honey Press has recently published Untitled Sequence, a chapbook of ten short poems written in the 1970s and just recently revised.