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Peter Riley had this to
say about Nicholas Moore's later poems, introducing a selection of them for
the Conductors of Chaos anthology (ed. Iain Sinclair, 1996):
Everything
loosened up in this orgy of pre-rejected writing.
Since nobody
was listening, the poetry could be 'anything'.
Long
meditations, short epigrams, rhymed and unrhymed,
measured and
unmeasured, sonnets, songs, ballads, blues,
straight
philosophical statements, symbolic landscapes,
surrealist
figurations, imagist trances, jokes and nonsense,
poems in
gobbledegook, outrageous travesty and satire,
calm
description, detective poems,
jazz poems, cricket
poems, haiku,
doggerel, pure 1940s lyrics and persona
narratives. .
. all 'rubbish', all free as the wind.
Nothing in The Day's Final Balance is so flagrantly rubbish - Riley is hardly a
neglected poet as Moore was - but the aesthetic space that Riley is admiring
does have a counterpart here, most obviously in the hundred or more very
short poems that comprise "Floating Verses" , a very complex form
because of how it slipslides vertiginously between the silly, accessible
Tuesday
Got up.
Stayed.
Went back.
and the highly wrought:
The party of
children in wheelchairs at the planetarium
And their
stately indifference.
Another phrase from that introduction also resonates: Moore's "claiming
a personal meditative space" in defiance of the public literary world.
The most characteristic of the floating verses lie between the extremes,
between quotidian throwaway and a lyricism that's a little sullied by the
deflating implications of its neighbours. But the real work of the page
develops behind the verses: a world in which lyricism, philosophy, jokes,
nonsense and banality all rub along composes both the meditative space and
what it meditates.
And, to some degree, a similar space is opened up by the book as a whole. As
an instance of that genre of qualified legitimation, an Uncollected Writings, it delights in being deliberately a very mixed
bag.
Riley's work is full of paradoxes. For besides this leaning towards the
freedom and space of an unliterary aesthetic, his work also contains Alstonefield, one of the most finished of modern English poems, so sincerely
enthused over as, so to speak, possessing the classic status that its form on
the page seems to propose. If at times enthusiasm for Riley has tended to
take the form only of votes rather than witnesses - but you cannot
cross-examine a vote - Alstonefield has certainly begun to generate a small hill of
commentary with that communal momentum that becomes mutually enlightening,
and engaging. Reading the pieces by Jamie Wilkes and Kelvin Corcoran on the
recent symposium in Intercapillary
Space (http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2007/10/peter-riley-symposium.html),
you feel you want to join in. The presence here of "Alstonefield
VI" is perhaps the most substantial reason why people will buy The Day's Final Balance - this and also the prose piece
"Alstonefield" are essential pendants to the earlier work,
summating and slipping out beyond it. "Alstonefield VI" consists of
twenty stanzas, of which this is one:
And all the
people in the land, as the clouds clear,
without
priority, the fruit of work, all pain and
sorrows over.
These are the ghosts in the white stone,
written in the
strata: Go down, you blood red roses.
And all the
work in the land, as the stars fade, doesn't
bear more
result than a leaf reaching the ground, all
its joys a
history. Such are the songs that surround us,
near and far
to comforting me, shadows on the sea.
So with some
sense of purpose on a thick morning I
pass by empty
fields to a tree-crowned pinnacle.
The "thick morning" varies the "warm day" of the previous
stanza. Its haze is re-figured in a number of other images with other
intention: bread ovens smoking, houses that are heaps of smouldering ash (in
a war-torn village), a smoke-filled cellar (musicians in Cluj), a view of
Paris from Belleville on a misty morning. The poem is freely conversational,
though decorated with high-style generalities and internal rhymes; despite
these formal bracers the stanzas have trouble arriving at a resonant close,
though apparently they strive to, and the poem eventually elects to stop in
mid-stanza. The thought has occurred to me that the poem confesses to having
moved outside the orbit of the original Alstonefield; confesses in a recurrently comic spirit as if
this is a comic failure, but holds in its belly the alternative possibility
of being a serious critique of the earlier poem.
Another paradox: Riley is both a fine writer and a maker of writings. Two
skills that imply almost contrary interests, and you would think that one
would quickly give way to the other, but this has never yet happened. For the former, try this:
Like a sob
interrupted by a froth of blood
The far cry
of the cockerel tore apart the misty air
(Riley versioning Baudelaire in the last part of "Memory Street").
For the latter, see, in The Day's
Final Balance, such pieces as the
eloquently restrained "Royal Signals", based on the war diaries of
Riley's father, or the "Small Square Plots", written over other
people's poems from the 1940s, perhaps the most difficult poem here because
it both asserts historical context and then declines it in the reading.
Another paradox: there is a luxuriance in the profusion of works that Riley
has written or over-written or re-written, yet there's a persistent aesthetic
of plainness in the diction. Look at this evocation of soprano saxophone, a
complete section from "Six Musical Experiences":
5. Steve Lacy (soprano saxophone)
Carefully, feeling the way, like a slug,
testing the ground
with our
horns, retracting and proceeding, and, as the day
gathers
force, opening out, breathing in a wider and wider
landscape.
The full and chiming biomental sphere, bright
with trees
and mice and nesting orioles. . .
Song at the
pitch of hunger, the blackbird in the late evening,
breaking his
time across the stones of the valley by the
slight rain
for the truth of it, lost for the furtherance . . .
This
"we" is no more than a trust, and an audience.
And the mice,
what about the mice? They are gnawing holes
in our
hearts,
To let
through the light.
I suppose the rumbling elongation of the second paragraph ("for the
truth of it, lost for the furtherance") is what most clearly identifies
this as Riley's work. But the thin sound of the saxophone is also there in
the threadbare beginning and end of this piece. "Carefully" is such
a colourless word, a word that you know was not chased down in the dictionary
but merely said; compare the leaf "reaching" the ground in the
quotation from "Alstonefield VI". The words "beautiful lack" rise out of the final
poem in "Small Square Plots" as an epigrammatic description for
this effect, which it also instantiates - for "beautiful" is a
colourless word, too. (The resultant emptiness/spaciousness and illuminating
darkness are what I draw from Melissa Flores-Borquez' "General
Remarks" in the aforementioned symposium.)
These paradoxes are all latently present in the triumphant early poem
"Introitus" which begins this collection. The author, on the Stade
at Hastings, gets absorbed into the mechanics of walking on shingle:
you
have to
lean forwards
so you'd fall if you didn't push
your feet
back from a firm step down and
back sharp
forcing the separate ground
to
consolidate underneath you, with a marked
flip as you
lift each foot, scattering
stones
behind, gaining momentum.
The description does not strike you as gobsmackingly evocative, yet with
repeated attention it does seem distinctive: there's a strength arising from
the author working himself into a position from which to find something new
about the world. As this continues the marine space gathers around the poem:
That nothing
comes
is good. No
news
across the
shore is
excellent,
the truth
is
there for a start.
The flesh is
full
of what there
is
there / then,
has that,
offers
back self, is
one
of all that.
A palpable sense of getting somewhere and knowing it suffuses the poem. It,
the thing that "begins" in the poem's opening line, is carrying on
happening. Few of the other early poems match this opener, I think only the
one called "Archilochus: the complete fragments" (in fact, versions
of just a few of them - but wonderful versions that are engineered to make a
complete artefact). Here, as in
the later "Three Pastoral Poems", we are tantalized by the sketch
of a project from which might have sprung the immense flow of an Excavations.
Perhaps it is related to the unliterary plainness mentioned above, but some
of the prose pieces here hardly suggest a considerable writer at all: the
"Carpathian Pieces" in particular are like superior blog entries,
contemplating the beggars and spiny dry fruits that get into your sandals
that any other intelligent northern European notices in southern Europe. The
content is sometimes modestly interesting, but it's composed shoddily and the
impression is that the writer is not bothered about being elegant or
circumspect in order to satisfy the expectations of a critical audience.
Nevertheless, in "St Albans"
there is a kind of link between
the shoddiness and the wasteland subject which could be expressive - which
sometimes is expressive precisely in failing to be competently expressive!
Biographically this habit of slipshod expression may provide the unexpected
opening for the kind of art that Riley makes when he's really making. There's
a directness in the connection that is a peculiar strength. Or again,
"Manchester" is mainly a casually interesting memoir - Riley does
not strike me as really interested in cities, unless when they are a smear of
lights on the horizon - but it's when he gives vent to loose political
generalities that the forces that underlie his creativity begin to push up
through the prose:
I make a
terrible mess of the days, but I never agreed
to Salford.
In the end there were conflicts between
that broad
liberality of the thriving city where any
worker might
have access to the fullest reach, and that
which made
the city thrive, which stripped the worker
of everything
but abject ambition, and grew fat on
his/her
heart-consuming worry until the whole country
is steered on
fear. The burrowing had to stop. In the
end it didn't
matter how any bunch of seekers wrapped
themselves in
the fabric of the town, it was going to go
on as an
illusory thriving running into the ground. The
creative
focus lay out of sight.
As the metaphors pull away from mere analysis I suddenly begin to feel how
it's really not such a long step to get to this (from the inspiriting
"Prose poems and pieces written at the time of writing Excavations", which reflect the light of their greater companion):
A step
forward and the past clarifies. Geometry of the
heartland,
moon marks on the ridge,
the river stepping
down the
vale... What we work to, lies here in the decided
risk, the
speech saying yes, on, yellow feather at the world
focus as the
chest empties into [song] bursts into [help]
I've mentioned most of the things I like best in The Day's Final Balance, but perhaps I haven't sufficiently emphasized the
stray, welcoming lyric poems that are best discovered by leafing through the
book at random, so I'll end with one of the "Four Transylvanian
Songs":
I ask
unspeaking earth,
silent
totality, for help,
to mend the
heart
badly broken
And hurting.
It is not the heart
but we say
heart to describe the hurt.
The earth
banging on my coffin lid
will silence
all that.
And I'll be a
star in the sky
shining faintly
at the edge of the sky over the forest
and around
midnight I'll poke around the houses
to see what
my loves are up to.
© Michael Peverett 2007
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