Peter Riley is well-known in the UK. He is the author of ten substantial books of verse, and numerous small-press collections. His selected poems, entitled PASSING MEASURES, was published by Carcanet in 2000. But more recently, Riley has produced a fascinating volume of prose poems entitled EXCAVATIONS (Hastings: Reality Street Editions, 2004).
Expressed factually, Riley's sources of inspiration for this work don't look very promising. That is, EXCAVATIONS is funded largely by the author's reading of various nineteenth-century non-fiction prose accounts of archaeological digs in the English countryside. These digs sought to uncover the contents, structural methods and, where possible, the ideals motivating the building of the huge number of tumuli and barrows (burial mounds) that cluster throughout the remoter corners of England. The majority of these graves are prehistoric - Bronze Age or Stone Age - although others belong to the Roman, or even Saxon eras. Riley's authors, at least in the direct quotations he offers, it is true, provide fascinating accounts of their discoveries, and at the same time, betray a great deal about their own attitudes to the things they find. For the most part, Riley transcribes their laconic descriptions of the arrangements of skeletal remains, whole or partial, much as he himself finds them - he, too, is an 'excavator'. But in compiling his extracts, and in generously interspersing them with his own reflections, meditations, interpretations and so on, he demonstrates in a wholly practical way just what our efforts to read the past entail. That is, almost at every step, Riley pauses to consider the thing he has at hand: How does it relate to the foregoing? How has it been understood previously? What does it say about the person or culture that prepared it? And what links can be seen to exist between it and the society Riley himself inhabits? As if this weren't enough of a project, the poet has also chosen, very sensitively, I think, to fuse his nineteenth-century predecessors' work with tiny, sometimes glittering, fragments of English verse. These are lifted without explicit design from anthologies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, and they add a further dimension to EXCAVATIONS - one which is hard to explain. It may be that Riley has chosen these additional models for any number of historical, or even political reasons; but a more likely explanation is that the era of their composition was one in which English pastoral verse flourished. Therefore, the infusion of images, ideas and phrases from this tradition go some way towards enhancing the feeling that the core subject of EXCAVATIONS is one which is joined inextricably to the English fields, moors and wolds which form the backdrop of the poems. Meditations on death and discovery, on loss and permanence such as these, indeed deserve to be informed by a sense that everything that takes place on these remote rural stages does so in the company of thousands of years' worth of witnesses. Every successive interment occupies a space previously belonging, at least in part, to an unknown ancestor. And the result is 181 poems that in no sense depend upon one another, yet which, taken together, form a compelling narrative with a wide variety of tones and inflections.
