Andy Sanderson, The North, issue 37, 8th December 2005

Peter Riley's Alstonefield: a poem is a digressive meditation on this and that. Its ten line stanzas are often quite prosy, though they do have a full or half rhyme flourish, not necessarily at the ends of the two lines, but somewhere thereabouts which allows for variation, or, if you like, approximation. The poet sets out on a night ramble from the village of Alstonefield in Derbyshire and returns to the same village at dawn. On the way we have a kind of dark-night caberet of the hi-tec soul, a Quixotic quest along the Manifold valley tilting at various windmills, in the first-person banter of a reconteur regaling the drizzle, a nostalgic Pierrot under the moon.

One impulse behind the poem seems to be the loss of various sorts, and the injunction to recover value in the face of such losses. Riley lived in the area for some years and returned in order to write the poem, framing the experience as a kind of recherché. The prefatory material to the poem consists of letters written by the poet to a friend setting out certain personal feelings about the place 'which mattered': 'Something was held in the hand which meant something...a central healing balance between the cruelties of monetarist disdain and those underdog resentment...' We do re-visit the mysticism of the place poetry of the mid-to-late seventies to a degree: 'A deific glow that scutters out of sight when you turn to face it, but integral to the entire geology...' And, as we go, one tries to keep up. One group of lines is displaced by quick change of subject; car-boot sales, agri-business, the economy, work, education, Growth Of The Poet's Mind, on your left more mine shafts, Meldrewian grumps on how walkers have created 'autobahns', sudden bursts of self-reflexive po-mo credo: 'Cosmic history in the metaphrase / of sexual reticence, but the text belongs to / its addressee...', the bathetic-sublime: 'Shadows / of the edging trees band the lawn that upcurves / so slightly at the pericarp or tone border I / am head-bashed against the fact of my ardour...' until one thinks one might just as well let him go on ahead. The poem chats and often tells. But the best bits are the attempts to dramatise the coarse sewing together of a life, the desperation in the face of illness and death, which in the poem leads us to the issue of redemption. It feels like a no-holds barred recognition of plurality complete with resentment at it. The middle-aged war child, the Coleridgean solipsist out walking in the night; (can a solipsist have an audience?): the 'white-faced clown' let down by the promises of socialism (two digs at Marxism in the prefatory letters), in part a product of the forces he despises (e.g. Cambridge: 'I'm opposed to a universities poetry') - sets out to turn his attention to what matters. Answer: 'what ardour you bear to an unknown point...' And at one Dantesque point, the attempt to dramatise an encounter with an Other (Shostakovitch), 'Thick rectangular lenses/white sickly face that catches the moon and / throws it back. Hardly any lips at all, just a / wobbly line of mouth turned down at the ends...' reveals that the great composer also suffers from indigestion. The wear and tear to body and soul, the consolation of music: 'death was all along the only / adversary and ever is'; a self-determination, which pits consciousness against body, forms the proper climax to the work: 'I've got arthritic fingers, backache, a sliding / hiatus hernia, frontal headache, chronic bronchitis... clown on a unicycle my/head spinning with sinusitis...' Soon, we reach the turning point of the night journey and Riley uses direct, effective language:

Knifed ground, I struggle into it. And try to
stand up but the wind blasts over the top, tears
my hair, pushes the snot back up my nostrils,
I can't stand it; I duck under the wall and fists
to cheeks crouch under the holy border. Then
turn onto my side clutching my legs on stones
among the stone mounds and close my eyes...

Slapstick takes us into the relief of dawn: 'The grey fields emerging into visibility, / the laying of diffused water on the land, the leaves / throwing open their shutters and switching on / the radio for the morning news: distant stories, threats and promises, all quietly...' to bring us back to Alstonefield and environs: 'We must stand by our own stories' he says, though the past time biographical detail sometimes peels off half-stuck and the personal/political rants are often just simple disclosure. Warts and all, the poem provokes, and its attempt is one reason for us to take a serious interest.