July 6 HOLIDAY READING The Llŷn Writings by Peter Riley Review by C.J.Allen Ah, The Holiday Poem, that notable weakness of the poetry-inclined, educated, literary middle-classes everywhere. You know the sort of thing … You go to Tuscany/Marrakesh/Bucharest. You wander around with your melancholy/charming companion/guidebook. You swoon over the architecture/paintings/atmosphere of decayed gentility. You meet a colourful cab driver/peasant/street urchin. You go back to your hotel/pension/apartment. You open up your laptop/notebook/mini-bar. You start to write The Holiday Poem.
So when I read that “The Llŷn Writings” is a complete collection of all peter Riley’s writings that have resulted from annual visits to the Llŷn Peninsula in North Wales between 1977 and 1988 …’ I was, understandably, on my guard. But I need not have been. Because “The Llŷn Writings” gently overturns my carefully wrought prejudices about The Holiday Poem, by virtue of its being the utter antithesis of polite, mundane accounts of ‘somewhere else’. "The Llŷn Writings" is, in fact, a not infrequently challenging and sophisticated collection of poems-of-place from which Peter Riley’s imagination and poetry take dramatic flight. These are not ‘empirical poems in the accepted English mode’ (as the blurb points out). These are poems of collapsed time-scales and realities. They are not at all boring. The book opens with ‘Sea Watches’, an ‘extended sequence’ (itself a phrase to strike mild terror into the inner-being of the dedicated student of contemporary poetry; but, again, we need not have worried), that first appeared in “Passing Measures” (from Carcanet in 2000). It is written in tight, 6 line stanzas, each stanza rhyming with the next stanza but one – so stanza one rhymes with stanza three, two with four etc. It’s clever but not just-for-the-sake-of-it clever. The distant chime of the separated rhymes adds a kind of longing note, a sort of far-off rhythmic pulse like … well … like the sea, I suppose.
That mention of the ‘pilgrims’ goal’, by the way, is a reference to Bardsey Island - a major medieval pilgrimage destination – just off the coast of the Llŷn Peninsula. The notion of pilgrimage – historical, religious pilgrimage as well as its contemporary secular equivalent in the annual Riley family holiday – recurs throughout the book, which is, in part, an exploration of the very idea of the ritual journey. If that makes it sound rather hefty and worthy it isn’t meant to. “The Llŷn Writings” is a thoughtful consideration of, amongst other things, journey and ritual, but it’s thoughtful in the ‘thinking-with-your-feelings’ way that Elizabeth Bishop said poetry does best. I like very much ‘the soft/ Edge of Britain’, the ‘barking’ sea, and the way the language runs between the lyrical and the hurried, telegraphed remark. I was also suitably chilled and discomfited by the idea of ‘… the same us with different/ surfaces …’ that seems to speak at once very economically and yet profoundly about the ineluctable wearing-away of things that Time has made one of its grisly specialities. I haven’t read a great deal of Peter Riley’s poetry, but I am aware of its association with the Cambridge School, and there are aspects of the writing that have what I can only think of calling an experimental dimension – although I dislike the word ‘experimental’ in this context, as it suggests a kind of uncertainty very distant from the poetry itself. "The Llŷn Writings" finds poetry in lots of different forms. There are poems in prose, poems as notes on or for other poems, an ‘abandoned poem’, and something called ‘The Nightwatch Notebook’ which is explained as being ‘Texts prepared in 1989 for Sea Watches VIII then called ‘Eight Sea Sunsets’ and the whole work ‘Shining Cloth’, written at night out on the cliff or on returning to the caravan, in either case in the dark and not entirely legible.’ Here is an excerpt, headed ‘Sunday’:
And this is from the (untitled) final section
These are lines that seem to resonate with the strange, de-personalised authority of the uncovered fragment. They are swift, slightly tentative and, perhaps because of that, all the more immediate and strong. The phrases and ideas build one upon another, build, occasionally stumble and then rebuild, so that the authority is not assumed, but accrues. The voice sounding through "The Llŷn Writings" is not a big, hectoring Poetry Voice, neither is it wise-cracking or wistful; it’s simply true to itself. There is a respect for the reader’s intelligence; the poetry doesn’t talk down to you or try to win you over with flashy poetry-stuff and big, knockout punch-lines. It’s not afraid of difficulty, because to fear difficulty doesn’t just limit your world view, it limits what you can do with the language, and one of the things that Peter Riley is clearly trying to do here is extend the range and reach of the language. Again and again, "The Llŷn Writings" hits a hauntingly lyrical and elegiac note. It is beautiful in the way that sad music is beautiful. It’s full of looking back, seeking not so much resolution as recognition that you were there once and the something that happened happened to you; in that sense it treads the Wordsworthian line of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. The collection concludes with ‘Llŷn Going’:
Sometimes "The Llŷn Writings" is a book of poems and sometimes it’s a poet’s notebook, a memoir, a passage from a guidebook, or half a history lesson. Part of the charm of the book is its apparent honesty, the way the material is arranged (I almost want to say exhibited), the way the reader gets to see the notes and memories turn into poems, and then the poems turn back into notes or fragments of autobiography. The whole thing is very open and – curiously for material that is often allusive and stylistically disruptive – accessible. It has the unfinished quality of a life. © C. J. Allen, 2007 July 7 BREAK There is going to be a short break in activity here -- I am going (or coming -- coming or going) back to the UK on July 30th, but in the couple of weeks leading up to that I'm going to be travelling a little in China, and/or without a home in China, so I probably won't be able to do much with this blogzine thing until I get back to England. I'll see you soon. July 13 FROM "WORKS IN PROGRESS" A poem by Jeremy Twill AND THEN THERE WERE SOME (from “Works in Progress”) Upset. This water beckons me: Incidents. Chew sky to bits. Milk. Treasures fill the house. Move the tree. Emotional. Mother Streaming. Do not touch ground. © Jeremy Twill, 2007 July 31 BACK I just got back to England. 15 hours flying time from Hong Kong to London, via Dubai ~~ to which has to be added the day and the night in Hong Kong seriously determined to be a good boy and not giving in to temptations (honestly, I was good; I'm not always good but this time I was good), the couple of hours pre-flight in Hong Kong airport, the four hour wait to transfer flights in Dubai (an airport with a singular shortage of anywhere to sit but lots of places to spend money), the 30 minute wait on the tarmac at London because there was no parking space, and another 30 minutes in which my brother, bless him, couldn't find his car. It's going to be another couple of weeks, I think, before I actually get "home", by which I mean back to Nottingham ~~ where I have a new apartment waiting for me. But then I have to move all my stuff in and get organised and, of course, fix up internet service and all that shit. So life here on E&D is still going to be a little patchy over the next few weeks, and dependent upon my access to a computer and time to do it. Please be patient. |