Breaking Cover: Peter Riley's Passing Measures

Breaking cover: Peter Riley's Passing Measures1 Kc: ...what tradition is present in your writing? PR: English poetry. All of it, good, bad and indifferent, popular and unpopular, overvalued and neglected, the lot. It's an entire climate, all the poetry being written at this time in this country. Kc: [Gasp!]2 There is no audience: there is one reader at a time comprising the potential of all readers, who has to be entirely trusted and honoured and is infinitely demanding. Which is to say that the poet is, actually, in love with the reader. There can be no qualification to that, except, of course, the reader's absence.3 Oxford University Press's outrageous decision to shed its poetry list in 1998 gives a misleading impression of the current state of poetry publication in the U.K. Indeed, this is an opportune time to attend to a loosely related group of poets who began writing in the U.K. during the mid-1960s and early 1970s, but whose work has not been easily obtainable until now. Michael Schmidt's Carcanet Press and Neil Astley's Bloodaxe Books, two of the most prolific poetry publishing houses in Britain, have begun to bring out single-author collections of writing which until the last few years had been side-lined by the larger publishers. In 1997 Bloodaxe published Barry MacSweeney's The Book of Demons, the poet's first "overground" publication since Hutchinson published his debut collection, The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother, as long ago as 1968. And in 1999 Bloodaxe in association with Folio and Fremantle Arts Centre Press published J. H. Prynne's monumental Poems, a corpus of writing which has variously inspired, enthused, and (more usually) infuriated British readers and poets ever since 1968. Carcanet had begun to anthologise some of this "left-field" writing in the late 1980s, and in 1995 published Michael Haslam's A Whole Bauble, gathering an exemplary, individual career from 1977 to 1994. In 1996 Penguin Modern Poets brought out a concise selection of poems from Douglas Oliver, Denise Riley, and lain Sinclair-Sinclair had tried to promote the poetry of Doug Oliver and others through an ill-fated Paladin Poetry series in the early 1990s. And in 2000 Carcanet in association with "infernal methods" published R. F. Langley's Collected Poems, a life-work of just seventeen poems over 72 pages. This immediately garnered a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was also shortlisted for the prestigious national Whitbread Poetry Award (won in the previous year by Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf). The independent presses and fugitive magazines must have been doing something right for all those years in the margin (I should declare an interest here, as R. F. Langley's infernally methodical publisher). It's also vital to highlight two other ambitious collectings from this loosely-related wave of writing: Denise Riley's Selected Poems, (absolutely no relation!) issued by Reality Street Editions (2000), and Anna Mendelssohn's Implacable Art, published by Folio and Equipage (2000). Probably the only quality uniting these diverse poetries is an intent to seriously challenge reader expectations about the demands which writing might make, and partly as a consequence of this ambition there are a number of careful and reflective statements as to the nature of poetic language from these writers. The latest of these is to be found as self-reflexive commentary in "Lyric selves," chapter three of Denise Riley's The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (Stanford, 2000). Therefore the ways in which this sometimes intransigent poetry is becoming more readable raises interesting questions: What changes in publishing culture have allowed this writing to become more visible? How does the reading of poems like these develop when they leave the immediate context of their writing and local circulation? This outline of recent British publishing history is not only helpful in situating the poetry of Peter Riley, it is actually necessary, because he has for over three decades made such an important contribution to informal networks and alliances for writing in the U. …