April Eye
Peter Riley’s website
Only the song stands high to see
on stones of the yard on the message wire
stands and calls, brushes water from coat,
everything said returns to the throat
Making there its nest, red cell cluster that
closes the light and leaves the land
quiet under vast rain vast under spread pain
lapping the edges of a modern caravan again.
Later it won’t matter what these words mean
in the light of what these words seem a cat
on a wall a rook on a wire a sheep in a field a
hope lost in the pink world home to its believer.
And the long land with white houses proposes
a symmetry to your warring poses and the answer lies
all round you. A little flock of some little bird or other
over the rain beaten bushes flares and falls together.
Do so and melt. Zerschmilts, du felsenhartes Hertze!
Everything said runs back to the throat, and
works there a form of gain. A security brighter
than the fields, and harder than the rain.
A solitude which is gained, a safety in a shortness
of time, curved to the sky and turning round and
round again a chaconne which we bird voices
trill over in flight, settling to the bar of night.
A solitary night together, all of us. Towards
the end of which a passing luminous creature
spreads a call over the roof concerning death that cause
of fear. Wrapped in distance we count it ever more dear.
1998. From Llyn Writings.
The quotation in German is from an eighteenth century opera which is never now performed, and means, “Melt, you stone-hard heart!” I don’t normally quote in a foreign language without an immediate in-text translation, but there didn’t seem to be room for that here. My address to the world is occluded by the world’s resistance or stone-hard heart, like something in a foreign language, or something never performed. It seemed best therefore not to address the world. So, poetry.
Other poems may seem to be quite different from this one but it is only a question of degree. There are no different kinds of poem, just different levels of toxicity. This one is about 40%, like Cuban rum.
Writing poems does not make you a “poet”. I don’t know what does. It’s an activity not a condition. There are other kinds of writing and “writing” is a much happier word than “poetry”, a far less threatened arena. There are stories, sketches, accounts / poetics, criticism, theoretics / about music, about places, about pictures, about mountains, about dreams... / the story of my life, the life of my story... / there is a lot of worry about the world and there is a kind of political substratum but if it becomes politics it gets very unhappy again, as it would too if it were philosophy. But one persists with poetry, through its resistance and its melancholy. And that’s about all: the ‘cello playing is excruciating and the piano playing isn’t much better, progress in the gamelan orchestra is slow, and T’ai-chi has been restarted at grade nil. I reckon I have the best collection of recorded Transylvanian village music in the British Isles but I could be wrong.
The Books: retrospective and texts
Bibliography and notes (a) Peter Riley
Bibliography (b) Poetical Histories
Unpublished or uncollected essays:
Dawn Songs
Notes to Aria with Small Lights
Notes to Poems to Pictures by Jack B. Yeats
After-notes to The Dance at Mociu
Unpublished or uncollected poetry:
Shining Cliff
U.S. Western
TO COME:
Notes to Greek Passages (when it has been published)
Remarks on Alstonefield
Archaeology / Remarks in Excavations
Lead Mines / Remarks on Tracks & Mineshafts etc.
Music
Transylvania
Abstract images by Colin Whitworth
? sound
? video
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This site last updated 27th August 2008.
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© Peter Riley, 2007-2008, unless otherwise stated.
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