The long high song echoing
over the trees down the slope
the leaves flicker a world picture

A tempered wish, a tied purpose
slices the air, our failing
falling ecstasy, our trade.

from ‘Shining Cliff’

The Glacial Stairway takes the reader on journeys in verse and prose, over a mountain pass in the Pyrenees, from King's Cross to the School of Oriental and African Studies; to the seasons of eighth-century China by way of a series of twentieth-century readings; through a wood in Derbyshire and on a road trip across the American West, 'charmed zone of bears and ghosts'.

In poems and sequences written between 2003 and 2010 Peter Riley explores his terrain in extended meditations and monologues, collages of fragmented noticings and sudden bursts of song. Layering and counterpoint: the past surfaces; voices reverberae, picking up the themes. The mental traveller encounters pressures of history, culture and language, across time and place.

His poetry is urgently challenging and immensely valuable - David Kennedy, PN Review