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Chapter Nine

‘Where lives converge’: Peter Riley and the Poetics

of Place

Neal Alexander

Peter Riley is a poet deeply engaged with the poetics of

place, producing representations of landscape that are at once

learned, reflexive, and rich with the details of sensuous

experience. Walking frequently serves his narrators as a means

of phenomenological immersion and performative enactment,

though a dense weight of research into the history, geography,

and geology of his chosen loci is discernable between or

behind the lines, as are a profusion of playful intertextual

dialogues. Specific places provide both creative impetus and a

thematic focal point in texts from across Riley’s large and

diverse ouevre; as Simon Perril remarks, his poetry ‘has

rigourously anchored itself in place and landscape.’1 For

instance, the sequence, Sea Watches (1991), is set almost

1 Simon Perryl, ‘Trapqings of the Hart: Reader and the Ballad of The English

Hntelligencer’, The Gig 4/5:(The Poetry of Peter Riley (1999/2000), p. 197.

200

entirely on the Llŷn Peninsula in north-west Wales – as are a

number of related poems – and is accompanied by detailed

‘Topographical Notes’ explaining the historical, cultural,

religious, and personal significance of places depicted in the

poem.2 Another sequence, Noon Province, unfolds among the

villages, hillsides, and field margins of Provence, Southern

France, whilst other poems from the collection A Map of Faring

(2005) are prompted by locations in Romania, Austria, the

Czech Republic, Italy, and Spain.3 By far the most important

cluster of places with which Riley’s poetry engages, however,

are to be found in the Peak District and its surrounding

edgelands, where Riley lived for more than ten years in the

1970s and 1980s. In this essay I want to offer a detailed

reading of his long poem, Alstonefield (2003), in which the

writing of place is pursued through the familiar trope of

walking in the landscape. I will examine how the dynamics of2 Peter RiLey, Sea Watches (Kenilworth: Prest Roots Press, 1995). Alì of

Riley’s works respondmng to tie Llŷn0Peၮ inswla are cOlleɣted in Tɨe Llŷn

Wsitings (хxete: Shearѳman200Books, 2007)ၮ

3 Peter Riìၮù, A Map of Faring (WɥsŴ#Lafayåtte: Tarlor Press. 200ၮ). Noၮn

Pzovince is reprinted in its entirety in this volume.

201

settlement and locomotion in Riley’s text inform its

digressive reflection on the place-bound character of lyric

subjectivity, which in turn opens onto a critical dialogue

with the conventions and legacies of the pastoral mode. Eric

Falci argues that Riley’s ‘continuing series of Midland and

Northern topographies […] may end up constituting the most

significant engagement with location and landscape in

twentieth-century British poetry.’4 It is not my intention to

prove or disprove the validity of this claim, which is in any

case deliberately hedged in the conditional tense. However, I

do proceed on the assumption that Alstonefield constitutes Riley’s

most sustained and successful engagement with the poetics of

place to date, and is among the most accomplished examples of

contemporary landscape poetry.

Riley’s longstanding involvement in small press

publishing and association with the Cambridge School of avant-

gardist poetry has tended to assign him a place on the margins

of contemporary British poetry.5 He is well-represented in

those anthologies that define themselves in opposition to the

4 Eric Falci, ‘Place, Space, and Landscape’, in Nigel Alderman and C.D.

Blanton, eds, A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry (Oxford: Wiley-

Blackwell, 2009), p. 208.

202

poetic ‘mainstream’, such as Andrew Crozier and Tim

Longville’s A Various Art (1987) and Iain Sinclair’s Conductors of

Chaos (1996), and has received critical recognition within the

experimental poetry scene, but is otherwise overlooked if not

ignored.6 Keith Tuma suggests that Riley ‘might be thought of

as a late modernist’, as he is a writer who regards the poem

as ‘an unpredictable, mysterious, but altogether self-

contained artifact, the relationship of poet to poem as

5 Nigel Wheale observes that for over three decades Riley has made ‘an

important contribution to informal networks and alliances for writing in

the U.K., Europe, and America, first as a poet, but also as an editor,

publisher, translator, conference organiser, and not least, as the best-

informed distribution centre in the U.K. for new poetry in his day-job as

bookseller.’ Nigel Wheale, ‘Breaking cover: Peter Riley’s Passing Measures,’

Chicago Review 47, 1 (2001), p. 111.

6 Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville, eds, A Various Art (London: Paladin, 1987),

pp. 299-329; Iain Sinclair, ed., Conductors of Chaos (London: Picador, 1996),

pp. 402-12. See also Gillian Allnutt et al., eds, The New British Poetry 1986-88

(London: Paladin, 1988), pp. 240-44; Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain,

eds, Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University

Press, 1999), pp. 218-22; Keith Tuma, ed., Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and

Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 674-80; Rod Mengham

and John Kinsella, eds, Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (Cambridge: Salt,

2004), pp. 222-9.

203

“impersonal”.’7 Perhaps this description overplays the

‘difficulty’ of Riley’s poetry a little, for whilst it

displays rapid shifts between discourses, registers, and

idioms, and often makes use of composite or ‘open’ forms,

Riley’s work is rarely so ‘self-contained’ as Tuma implies.

Certainly, it is less forbiddingly hermetic than that of his

Cambridge contemporary J.H. Prynne, and less self-consciously

‘radical’ than that of John Wilkinson, Keston Sutherland, or

Maggie O’Sullivan.

This much is made clear by Riley himself, who describes

the relationship between a poem and its readers in the

following terms:

The poem can be conceived as an object between poet and

reader which is both a means of communication and a

barrier to communication. It is neither opaque nor

transparent. Things are seen through it only by being

seen in it, therefore with greater or lesser degrees of

faceting, distortion, isolation, association, reflection,

clarity.8

7 Keith Tuma, Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American

Readers (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp. 221, 220.

204

Clearly, a certain neo-modernist interest in the suspension or

‘distortion’ of meaning is evident here, and poetic language

is granted its capacity to obstruct understanding as much as

to facilitate it. Yet, poetry is also conceived as a vehicle

for communication that can aspire to a degree of ‘clarity’;

and if it is never wholly ‘transparent’ then neither is it

ever entirely ‘opaque’. The poem, Riley goes on to say, is

‘constructed out of paradoxical or conflicting motivations

within a tradition’, and this calls for an active role on the

part of the reader, who must follow or forge associations and

recognise the transformations wrought on experience by

language.9 What is also distinctive about Riley’s work is his

eschewal of the apparent opposition between a poetic

‘mainstream’ on the one hand, and a neo-modernist avant-garde

on the other. In an interview conducted in 1983 he affirms his

place in relation to ‘an entire climate’ of English poetry

rather than any particular faction; and more recently he has

laid claim to a notional ‘middle ground’ between the

mainstream and the avant-garde, saying: ‘What I do is like a

8 Peter Riley, ‘The Creative Moment of the Poem’, in Denise Riley, ed.,

Poets on Writing: Britain, 1970-1991 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 93.

9 Riley, ‘The Creative Moment of the Poem’, p. 99.

205

balancing trick, a ridge-top walk. I want to keep in view all

the possibilities, which are not just left and right, and kind

of steer a course through them.’10 The telling metaphor of the

ridge-top walk in this passage chimes appropriately with the

topography and procedures of Alstonefield, which performs its own

formal and stylistic balancing tricks, steering beyond ‘the

small poetry/ world, where fleas scratch cats.’11

The Peak District itself might be thought of as a kind of

‘middle ground’ located between the English midlands and the

industrial North, at the Southern end of the Pennine

moorlands; an area of upland pastures and wild bogs, rocky

tors and meandering river valleys, encircled by urban

conurbations and arterial transport routes. Riley registers

such ambivalences in Lines on the Liver when he describes the White

Peak, an area of carboniferous limestone that makes up the

Southern half of the National Park, as ‘a dome of ore-bearing10 Kelvin Corcoran, ‘Spitewinter Provocations: An Interview on the Condition

of Poetry with Peter Riley’, Reality Studios 8 (1986), p. 14; Keith Tuma, ‘An

Interview with Peter Riley’, The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of Peter Riley (1999/2000), p.

11.

11 Peter Riley, Alstonefield: A poem (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003), p. 26. All

further references to this volume will be given parenthetically in the

text.

206

shellmass, a white capsule of sedimentary patience’ surrounded

by ‘the magno-industrial parks and wastelands of a false and

hollow certainty’.12 A keen awareness of the interpenetrations

of natural, agricultural, urban, and industrial spaces

characterises Riley’s representations of the Peak District,

which is depicted both as a counter-site at odds with the

excesses of late capitalist modernity and a landscape that is

ineluctably shaped by and implicated in those very forces.

According to Yi-Fu Tuan, one function of literary texts

is ‘to give visibility to intimate experiences, including

those of place’ especially by illuminating certain

‘inconspicuous fields of human care’ that might otherwise

escape our notice.13 This seems to describe an important

impetus for Riley’s poem. Alstonefield is a village situated

in the North Staffordshire Peak District on the limestone

12 Peter Riley, Lines on the Liver (London: Ferry Press, 1981), p. 3. Please note

that Lines on the Liver is unpaginated; my numbering counts from the first page

of the main text. This volume has recently been republished, along with

Tracks and Mineshafts (1983), as The Derbyshire Poems, though Riley has revised the

wording of the passage cited. See Peter Riley, The Derbyshire Poems (Exeter:

Shearsman Books, 2010), p. 99.

13 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 1977), p. 162.

207

uplands between the valleys of the rivers Dove and Manifold,

an area that was historically associated with the mining of

copper and lead but is now largely given over to sheep-farming

and the leisure and tourism industries. The very ordinariness

of this location is clearly part of its attraction.14 Yet, in

Riley’s text Alstonefield’s ordinariness also consists in its

being an example of what Doreen Massey calls ‘meeting places’,

by which she means places as points of intersection for much

larger, potentially global, networks of social and spatial

relations. The specificity of place is thus not intrinsic or

essential, but ‘derives from the fact that each place is the

focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social

relations.’15 Alstonefield may seem remote from the effects of

globalisation and the metropolitan world of capital flows and

international politics, but actually derives its sense of

place through its relations with a multitude of elsewheres.

Riley highlights this point himself when he notes that14 In interview, Riley has said that the ‘everyday’ or the ‘ordinary’ is ‘a

zone that was always free of […] cultural militarism’ and therefore

something that his work seeks ‘to preserve intact as a productive space’.

Tuma, ‘An Interview with Peter Riley,’ p. 15.

15 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), pp.

154, 156.

208

Alstonefield is a place of contraries, a ‘labyrinth’ (1) where

nothing ‘is quite itself’:

An upland pastoral community run by machines; a weekend

break zone for the wild soul which betrays refused

planning permission at every turn; sublimity locked into

sordidness on the high pastures, elegance and care

struggling with cynical exploitation in the valleys … (2)

As a working landscape, the area is inevitably plugged into

the technologies of modern agriculture and its status as a

‘weekend break zone’ implies reliance on an affluent

population which happens to live elsewhere. Consequently,

landscapes of pastoral beauty and post-Romantic sublimity co-

exist awkwardly with those of ‘sordidness’ and ‘cynical

exploitation’, and in both cases the sedimentation of cultural

assumptions about such landscapes is acknowledged.

Riley initially published a shorter, four-part version of

Alstonefield in 1995.16 The expanded 2003 version, on which I will

concentrate, features a lengthy fifth part in which the

narrator undertakes a long, circuitous night walk through the

surrounding landscape, though it retains the original’s ten-

16 Peter Riley, Alstonefield: Stanzas unfinished (London/Plymouth: Oasis/Shearsman,

1995).

209

line stanza form and meditative, digressive narrative voice.

Alstonefield is also a densely ‘loco-specific’ text, mapping its

concerns and imagery not only in relation to the villages,

hills, and dales that most obviously mark the area’s

topography, but also naming farms, houses, pathways, tumuli,

and geological features in a manner that suggests both deep

local knowledge and scrupulous topographical exactitude.17

Riley’s poem implies that place is crucial to our experiences

of being and becoming, that identities are performed in places

just as places are in turn shaped by the imprints of human

identities. Or, as Jeff Malpas has it, ‘the structure of

subjectivity is given in and through the structure of place.’18

The poem’s narrator, clearly a version of Riley himself, is

described as a ‘wandering, and suitably impoverished,

17 I adapt the term ‘loco-specific’ from Peter Barry’s discussion of

contemporary urban poetry, where he makes a broad distinction between

‘setting’, by which he means generic indicators of location, and

‘geography’, which entails a much more specific rendering of particular

places identified by acts of naming and detailed description. Peter Barry,

Contemporary British poetry and the city (Manchester: Manchester University Press,

2000), pp. 48-9.

18 J.E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1999), p. 35.

210

definitely proletarian, pastoral or pasteurised, writing

person’ (3). Yet, the attempt to write place is never purely

solipsistic but also social, as it entails tuning into how

others have seen and experienced the landscape as well as

articulating one’s own impressions. Consequently, Riley’s

intensely reflexive search for the ‘meaning’ of Alstonefield

‘also discloses the limits of personal poetry’ (3), calling

the unity and coherence of the lyric subject into question.

Indeed, his speaker pointedly addresses some fundamental split

in selfhood when he speaks of ‘an abandoned centre’ ‘where/ we

live, I and I’ (18), and goes on to suppose the possibility of

‘a selfless self’ (43). Such strategies indicate Riley’s

affinities with the neo-modernist avant-garde, which, as Drew

Milne remarks, has ‘tended to fragment and disrupt assumptions

about the authority of subjectivity’; though Peter Robinson is

right to note that, rather than abandoning the lyric ‘I’

altogether, ‘Riley writes with the specified aim of

reinstating the singular subject, anxieties and all.’19

19 Drew Milne, ‘Neo-Modernism and Avant-Garde Orientations’, in Alderman and

Blanton, eds, A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry, p. 156; Peter

Robinson, ‘On Untitled Sequence’, The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of Peter Riley (1999/2000), p.

70.

211

Identity and subjectivity are both affirmed and problematised

through their relations to place in Alstonefield, and Riley

describes his text as ‘an interlinear commentary’ (2) that

derives its form from the geology of the landscape it

represents. As Tony Baker observes, Riley’s poem evinces a

‘geological attention’ to ‘manifold strata’ in its

representations of place and landscape.20 Indeed, person,

place, and poem are each imagined in terms of multiple strata

and accretions that mediate between surface and core: ‘Because

it is a sedimentary landscape, however distorted in the

details of the disrupted surface: the horizontal successions

of settling fundamentals underpin everything you see, layer

upon layer’ (4). Like the landscape itself, the text is a

palimpsest of folded and partially eroded layers that are each

permeated with the various historical, social, topographical,

and personal meanings of place.

Another of the recurrent tropes through which Riley

imagines place is that of convergence, an idea that is capable

of succinctly sketching in the proliferating relations whereby

20 Tony Baker, ‘A Démarrage, a Letter and a Postscript, Concerning (Mostly)

Peter Riley’s Alstonefield’, The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of Peter Riley (1999/2000), pp. 175-

6.

212

apparently distinct and bounded places are in fact integrated

into wider spatial networks.21 Thus, in Part III of Alstonefield,

the narrator watches a ‘mountain edge’ emerging from mist or

low cloud:

Surface that is a line hanging in the air

at which sight withdraws, a clarity on paper

anterior to the earth, broken by ink.

Lines that converge without touching

open centrally to a linen distance,

the whole air a time table. (15)

In this rather stark depiction of landscape details and

colours have been dissolved by the weather so that the fields

resemble a linen tablecloth on which a geometrical pattern of

lines stand out, converging but seeming never to meet. On one

level, these lines denote the ‘geometry of stone walls’ that

is a distinctive feature of the topography of the White Peak,

marking out the various property boundaries and spatial

divisions of the landscape as ‘parallelograms and asymptotic

curves’ (4). On another, they refer self-reflexively to the

21 Peter Larkin discovers a ‘geography of convergence’ informing Riley’s

earlier sequence, Sea Watches. Peter Larkin, ‘Sea Watches: Little More than

Arrival’, The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of Peter Riley (1999/2000), p. 117.

213

lines of the poem itself, for this bleached landscape is also

depicted via the metaphor of a white page ‘broken by ink’.

Moreover, the play of ‘clarity’ and obscurity that informs

this scene accords well with Riley’s views on the simultaneous

transparency and opacity of the poetic text, for the reader

struggles to trace the lineaments of place through a fog of

uncertain significations.

The trope of convergence or intersection also informs the

‘enclosure’ depicted in the poem’s opening stanzas, which

figures less as a bounded space than as a meeting place for

disparate thoughts, memories, and associations: ‘Every

impossible meeting/ happens here in darkness and silence/ and

the slightness of the piecing mind’ (6). As a result, the

speaker’s contemplation of Alstonefield as a particular place

leads him to intuit its connections with other places: with

‘distances steeped in petrol’ (6), ‘the spectral/ city’ (10),

and his home in distant Cambridge (11). Later, in Section V,

he follows such connections in the opposite direction,

contemplating a series of possible journeys that would radiate

outwards from Alstonefield along the cardinal points of the

compass: North to the ‘steelworks’ and ‘silver moors’ of

214

Yorkshire; West towards Stoke-on-Trent and the Staffordshire

plains; East to the ‘great keep’ of Lincoln; and South towards

‘the heart of smooth success’ (24-5). The effect of this

passage is, of course, to stress the linkages between

Alstonefield and the urban centres that encircle it, and so to

strengthen the sense of places as, in Massey’s terms,

‘heterogeneous associations’, nodes of intersection and

disconnection in more expansive spatial relays.22 Indeed, one

of Riley’s most succinct definitions of place is ‘[w]here

lives converge’ (20, 22), and towards the end of Part IV he

writes: ‘I find/ walking back to the guest house with my/

companion to hand the god tracks converge’ (22). These lines

not only depict place as a nexus of affective and social

relations but also enact the convergence of conversational and

mythopoeic registers, empirical reality and potent fiction.

That Riley’s speaker is so frequently depicted returning

to or setting out from his guest house reminds the reader that

his apprehensions of place are inflected by his status as a

transient visitor rather than a resident. However, Riley did

live in the vicinity of Alstonefield at a house called

Harecops, about two miles to the north of the village, for22 Doreen Massey, for space (London: Sage, 2005), p. 137.

215

several years during the 1970s. In Alstonefield his narrator

passes this former home a number of times, prompting the

intertwining of memories and present actions on each occasion.

Consider, for example, the following passage from Part V:

Boletus

flourish at

certain times of the year in the wood over to the left.

I remember this from when I lived here. That move

into the entire land when a couple becomes

a family, that optimism, took place in the big

stone house over there. (49)

The discursive, autobiographical register employed here

facilitates Riley’s subtle conjunction of different

temporalities, as present engagements with the landscape shade

into a range of emplaced memories. The faintly nostalgic image

of the remembered family home is sharpened by the contrast

made with the speaker’s current solitude, and the passage as a

whole underlines the fact that Riley’s narrator is not

encountering this place for the first time but rediscovering

it and sifting its various layers of significance. In this

way, Alstonefield exemplifies Peter Middleton and Tim Woods’s

216

point that places are ‘loci of memory; reference points of

narratives, propositions and emotions; signs of the passing of

time and the histories that mark it.’23 In a sense, all places

are over-inscribed with past associations that must be

interpreted anew each time they are encountered.

Riley has long been concerned with ideas of settlement

and dwelling, even when the poetry itself has tended to be

markedly unsettled, even restlessly peripatetic. The central

image of his early poem, ‘Material Soul’, describes a moment

of insight where ‘perception opens/ to a cleared space, a

settlement, holding/ people of all ages together’; and in

‘Driving up the Erewash and Arriving’ the speaker imagines

‘peace’ as ‘a space to which/ everyone had perfect right of

access’.24 What is clear in both cases is that Riley associates

the idea of being-in-place with the principles of equality and

inclusivity that would foster a democratic community. Of

course, the very idea of settlement also implies layers of

experience, the accrued histories of lives lived together in

23 Peter Middleton and Tim Woods, Literatures of Memory: History, time and space in

postwar writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 277.

24 Peter Riley, Passing Measures: A Collection of Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000),

pp. 13, 19.

217

place, as Riley makes clear in the closing image of Part IV of

Alstonefield. The village’s limestone houses ‘stand there like

gravestones century after/ century’, offering a sense of

permanence as ‘individuals and families pass/ through them and

out, each making a more/ or less hearted wrapper of the

inside’ (22). The simile that likens houses to ‘gravestones’

seems to imply that death is as much a part of such

communities as life; a sombre enough reflection. More

importantly, though, the central notion of individuals

‘pass[ing]/ through’ houses that both outlast them and are

inevitably shaped by their lives – an idea reinforced by the

telling use of enjambment in ‘century after/ century’ –

illustrates the mixture of transience and continuity that

informs Riley’s sense of place.

Alstonefield also develops a distinctly peripatetic

aesthetic, particularly in its lengthy final part, employing

the trope of walking as the text’s primary means of

experiencing and recording the meanings of place. This

emphasis upon movement and shifting perspectives is essential

to what Malpas describes as a ‘topographical’ delineation of

place. By this he means ‘a process that encompasses a variety

218

of sightings from a number of conceptual ‘landmarks’ and that

also undertakes a wide-ranging, criss-crossing set of journeys

over the landscape at issue – it is only through such

journeying, sighting and resighting that place can be

understood.’25 The embodied subject moving through the

landscape is able to register the rich phenomenological

dimensions of place because of her immersion in it, and

walking also promotes a thoughtful, meditative relation

between the self and the world. As Rebecca Solnit remarks,

walking ideally manifests itself as ‘a state in which the

mind, the body, and the world are aligned’; although, if this

implies harmony and balance, then as a literary trope ‘the

recounted walk encourages digression and association’,

rambling in both material and metaphorical senses.26 Indeed,

Riley has described Alstonefield as ‘a written ramble referring to

an actual one’, and the poem seems to elaborate his desire to

‘track the earth’, or to make tracks upon it.27 Walking25 Malpas, Place and Experience, p. 41.

26 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London: Verso, 2001), pp. 5,

21.

27 Todd Nathan Thorpe, ‘Peter Riley in conversation,’ Jacket 35 (2008)

<http://jacketmagazine.com/35/iv-peter-riley-ivb-thorpe.shtml> [Accessed 4

Jan 2012]; in ‘Prelude’, Riley’s speaker asks: ‘if we weren’t in the dark

219

provides his ambulant narrator with a means of practising

place by negotiating the manifold paths and intersecting

routes that traverse the surface of the landscape. Such

practices of negotiation and inscription are integral to the

production of social space, as Henri Lefebvre observes:

‘Traversed now by pathways and patterned by networks, natural

space changes: one might say that practical activity writes

upon nature, albeit in a scrawling hand, and that this writing

implies a particular representation of space. Places are

marked, noted, named.’28 The activities of marking, noting, and

naming are all prominent in Alstonefield; but if walking can be

understood as a means of reading or writing (on) the landscape

then it also parallels the experience of the reader attempting

to follow the meandering, divagating, and often disorientating

lines taken by Riley’s poem. As Riley’s narrator at one point

observes: ‘Long reaches/ and very difficult breaks are, with

practice,/ traversed, walked, passed alongside’ (28). Once

again, place and poem, landscape and written text mirror one

star’s way would our sense/ still track the earth whether we knew it or

not?’ Riley, Passing Measures, p. 14.

28 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 117-18.

220

another without ever quite collapsing the distinction between

material spaces and their representations.

That much of the walking in Alstonefield takes place at night

is also significant, for, as Robert Macfarlane observes, night

walking can radically alter the nature of one’s engagement

with place: ‘At night, new orders of connection assert

themselves: sonic, olfactory, tactile. The sensorium is

transformed. Associations swarm out of the darkness. You

become even more aware of landscape as a medley of effects, a

mingling of geology, memory, movement, life.’29 Similarly, as

Riley’s narrator wanders half-purposefully through a landscape

defamiliarised by darkness and moonlight, the poem braids

together a set of diverse concerns with topography and

history, physical sensation and the natural world, as well as

meditations on memory and loss. ‘This walk/ is a night walk of

the world where horizons/ meet’ (31), he says, making further

use of the idea of convergences in space and time. The same

figure is developed further when the speaker’s own ‘night-long

trudge’ (38) comes to be paralleled by those of the souls of

the dead, whom he imagines wandering the adjacent upland

meadows:29 Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places (London: Granta Books, 2007), p. 193.

221

Though time

destroy the person, the intent shall range

the upper levels while mortals sleep, and

patiently, patiently, think-tread the fields,

coaxing lasting peace formulae out of bitter grass. (35)

The notion of ‘think-treading’ that is introduced in these

lines parallels the act of physical locomotion with the

motions of the wandering, free-associating mind, just as the

central conceit shows the horizons of the living and the dead

meeting and intersecting.

Riley’s nocturnal ramble is unusual in its rural setting,

for as a literary trope the night walk has a much stronger

pedigree in urban writing from Thomas de Quincey through

Charles Dickens, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf to Thomas

Kinsella.30 As if nodding towards this tradition, Riley’s

narrator refers to himself as an ‘experienced/ city pavement

walker’ (28), imaginatively conflating street-walking with his30 On the fragmentary tradition of the literary night walk see Jeffrey C.

Robinson, The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image (Norman: University of Oklahoma

Press, 1989), pp. 77-87. Kinsella’s poem ‘Nightwalker’ escapes Robinson’s

notice – as does Joyce’s Ulysses – but is an important post-war example. See

Thomas Kinsella, Collected Poems 1956-2001 (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001), pp.

76-84.

222

perambulations of the dales. One non-urban precedent is Samuel

Taylor Coleridge’s account of his moonlit trek across the

ridges of Helvellyn to the Wordsworths’ cottage at Grasmere in

August 1800.31 Another exemplar is Ivor Gurney, who as a young

man ‘would go for long walks, sometimes stopping out all night

– sleeping, perhaps, under the stars or in some friendly

barn’, experiences that are frequently recorded or reworked in

his poems.32 Indeed, Riley’s narrator explicitly identifies

with Gurney late in his walk, saying: ‘I felt like Ivor

Gurney, to whom walking/ was a necessary music, audible in

darkness,/ eating the miles, consuming the place’ (82). This

notion of walking as ‘a necessary music’, heard in darkness

when vision is impaired, recalls Gurney’s dual role as poet

and composer. It also chimes with Riley’s own extensive

31 Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Harper Collins, 1998), pp.

281-2. I am grateful to David Cooper for bringing this example to my

attention.

32 Michael Hurd, The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1978), p. 25. See also, amongst others, ‘Glimmering Dusk’, ‘Darkness Has

Cheating Swiftness’, ‘Walking Song’, ‘Cotswold Ways’, ‘Fragment’, ‘On the

Night’, ‘Wandering Thoughts’, and ‘Dawns I Have Seen’ in Ivor Gurney,

Collected Poems ed., P.J. Kavanagh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982),

pp. 79, 81, 95-6, 103, 111, 131, 191.

223

allusions to music throughout Alstonefield, which range from

classical oratorios to Transylvanian ‘dawn songs’ and African

polyphonic singing.33

If, as J. Hillis Miller holds, every narrative ‘traces

out in its course an arrangement of places, dwellings, and

rooms joined by paths and roads’ then we map these

arrangements in our readings of the text.34 Certainly, because

of its density of topographical reference, the circular route

taken by Riley’s narrator in Part V of Alstonefield can be mapped

with some accuracy. Following a wet Sunday spent exploring the

barrows at Pea Low and Gratton Hill, he sets out from the

village pub, The George Inn, and heads North-East to the Dove

Valley, crossing the river by a footbridge below Cold Eaton.

He then follows the winding riverside path up Wolfscote Dale

as far as the mouth of Beresford Dale before moving West past

Barrack Farm and Harecops, crossing Archford Moor, and

reaching the neck of the Manifold Valley near Ecton. Something

33 On the use of musical allusions in Riley’s work, see Mark Morrison,

‘Peter Riley’s Author: Musical Allusion and the “Climate of Possibility”’,

The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of Peter Riley (1999/2000), pp. 139-62.

34 J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1995), p. 10.

224

odd happens at this point, for Riley’s narrator spontaneously

‘divide[s] into two travellers’ (59), one of whom walks the

snaking but level path by the River Manifold whilst the other

bears left over the windy ridge of Ecton Hill, formerly the

site of an extensive copper mining industry.35 These two

walking selves meet and merge again at Wetton Mill, from where

Riley’s narrator continues South along the river to a weir, at

which point he strikes out Eastwards towards Alstonefield via

Long Low and Hope Dale, finishing his night-long walk in the

murky light of dawn. As this brief summary suggests, Riley’s

loco-specific depictions convey a rich sense of local detail

and phenomenological ‘implacement’.36 Yet the erratic,

wandering thoughts and imaginings of his narrator also work to

sketch in, however fleetingly or fancifully, Alstonefield’s

35 On mining at Ecton Hill, see Riley’s note (107); John Barnatt and Ken

Smith, The Peak District: Landscapes Through Time (Macclesfield: Windgather Press,

2004), pp. 116-17; and John A. Robey and Lindsey Porter, The Copper and Lead

Mines of Ecton Hill, Staffordshire (Leek: Moorland Publishing, 1972).

36 The term ‘implacement’ is Edward Casey’s and refers to the experience of

being concretely placed so that ‘actual occasions’ are bound ‘into unique

collocations of space and time.’ Edward S. Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Towards

a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1993), p. 23.

225

relations to a much broader spectrum of places. These include:

Cambridge (26, 68, 79), Manchester (27, 28, 38, 82), Poland

(29), Derby (42), Mozambique (42, 91), Donegal (45), Zaïre

(58), Durban (78, 80), Dallas (87), Leeds (88), Korea (88),

and Louisiana (98). The arrangement of places that Riley

constructs in Alstonefield therefore articulates the relations of

place through a complex interdigitation of spatial scales that

vary from the intimately local to the global.

An implicit politics informs this apparently incongruous

collocation of proximate and distant places; indeed, Keston

Sutherland describes Riley as ‘a committed, thoughtful

democrat’.37 Riley’s democratic humanism suffuses much of

Alstonefield, but is particularly apparent in two passages where

past, present, and future, here and elsewhere become

interwoven. The first occurs when his narrator is leaving the

Dove Valley to move West across open country and pauses to

look down on what he calls ‘the oval meadow’, a place in

Wolfscote Dale that is repeatedly referred and returned to in

the poem. On this occasion, the narrator’s imagination

transforms this undistinguished river meadow into an urban

37 Keston Sutherland, ‘The Accomplishment of Knowing One’s Place’, The Gig 4/5:

The Poetry of Peter Riley (1999/2000), p. 138.

226

public space, ‘a Piazza del Populo’ in which ‘there’s both

time and need/ for democracy’ (44). This fantastic, utopian

vision soon begins to blur and fade, but seems to resonate

with his earlier self-description as ‘a person un-/ curfewed,

a citizen not a subject’ making his way in ‘plural space’

(43). In any case, the narrator’s nocturnal vision leaves a

lingering after-image that situates an ideal of Italian

republicanism in the landscapes of the White Peak: ‘A public

space, a meeting place/ of conflicting hearts on limestone

paving’ (45). Here again, the trope of convergence suffuses

and enriches Riley’s imaginative representations of place. The

second example occurs whilst one of the narrator’s split

selves is passing over Ecton Hill, a place that still bears

the marks of its history as a centre for copper mining but is

now largely forsaken and haunted by ‘industrial echoes’ (59).

Indeed, at one point, Riley’s protagonist thinks he hears a

chorus of voices booming out from the hollow ground beneath

his feet: ‘Dead miners/ carolling under the hill’ (63).

Subsequently, these concerns modulate into an oblique elegy

227

for the lost mining communities of the region and a satirical

critique of Thatcherite economic and social policies:38

Public good translates as business interests there is

a strange sense of déjà-vu as we creep home, and

the economy is saved, hoorah. But the economy

is not what we live, the economy is our enemy […]. (74)

This exposure of an underlying subtext to political rhetoric

is typical of much of Riley’s work, but so too is the mixture

of wry humour and serious-minded defiance that we see here.

The (perhaps over-simplistic) opposition between free market

economics and ‘life’ developed in these lines is reinforced

subsequently, when Riley’s narrator affirms: ‘We refuse to

die/ into this economy’ (74). At the same time, though, he

recognises his own culpability and acquiescence in the

political status quo, for he is, like everyone else, ‘crouched

38 Peter Middleton notes the importance of the industrial disputes and

miners’ strikes of the early 1980s as a context for Riley’s earlier Peak

District collection, Tracks and Mineshafts. Peter Middleton, ‘The Substance of

Tracks and Mineshafts’, The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of Peter Riley (1999/2000), pp. 54-6.

Similarly, John Hall argues that in Riley’s work of the 1980s mining and

dreaming are the primary metaphors, and ‘the miner becomes a figure of the

self, economically, ontologically’. Hall, ‘On Lines on the Liver and Tracks and

Mineshafts,’ p. 36.

228

against threat, paying the lords, waiting/ centuries for a

democracy that never arrives’ (79). A just and equitable

political order haunts Riley’s imagination throughout

Alstonefield, which vacillates between dejected realism and

utopian longing, addressing ‘the world/ in its hope’ (8).

As the examples of the piazza in the dales and the choir

of dead miners illustrate, Riley’s free-associating

meditations and ‘sleepless hermeneutics’ can often take on the

hallucinatory colouring of surreal fantasy; as, for example,

when his narrator dances in the moonlight with a giant rabbit

(38-9) or converses with the ghost of Shostakovich (46-9).39 He

also has encounters with, amongst others, an inquisitorial

sphinx (79), a clump of singing hawthorn bushes (84-7), and

the ominous ‘knight in the road’ from an old German ballad

(95-6). These episodes demonstrate Riley’s willingness to

blend reality and dream, the concrete and the abstract, the

philosophical and the humourous, although such techniques are

also shadowed by the dangers of flippancy and irrelevance, as

he seems to recognise. During the scene with the rabbit,

Riley’s narrator makes a point of pulling himself up short:

39 John Hall, ‘Before you Fall: Postlude on a Prelude’, The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of

Peter Riley (1999/2000), p. 44.

229

‘Look, this is a serious poem why am I/ waltzing with a

mammal?’ (39). Of course, there is a certain smug

sophistication in such knowing self-reflexivity, but a more

serious purpose informing these passages is Riley’s desire to

convey a sense of the random slippages of context and sense

that are made possible by a weary but active mind.

Something slightly different seems to be happening,

however, in those passages of the text in which Alstonefield

is populated by gods and goddesses, the manifest presences of

a genius loci. In Part II, Riley’s speaker exclaims: ‘Now I

sleep in Alstonefield. Gods and goddesses/ walk in the dark

fields and stand in a ring in the/ churchyard waiting for

light’ (11). A little later on, these figures return and are

pictured ‘strolling the fields waiting for dawn’ (32), making

their own ‘god-tracks’ (22) by walking the landscape. The

poem’s conception of place as a site of convergence between

different orders of being seems to owe more than a little to

the late thought of Martin Heidegger, both his notion that

‘earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness

into things’ through the condition of dwelling and his

enigmatic observation that: ‘To be a poet in a destitute time

230

means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive

gods.’40 Yet, whilst Riley’s attentiveness to the

phenomenological involvements of the body in its environments

does seem to align Alstonefield with what John Wylie calls ‘the

dwelling perspective’ of landscape writing, the peripatetic

restlessness and repeated decentring of the perceiving subject

that his text enacts ultimately disavows Heidegger’s notion of

an organic grounding in place.41 Indeed, as we have seen, place

is ultimately neither bounded nor stable in Alstonefield, but is

rather a point of convergence for many disparate narratives,

processes, and relations, a meeting place within far-flung

socio-spatial networks. Riley has said of the ‘religious’

vocabulary his poetry employs that it ‘remains valid as indeed

it remains in common parlance, while the religious structures

fall into dereliction.’42 Similarly, Alstonefield’s ‘god-tracks’

need not be regarded as the transcendent means by which heaven40 Martin Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ and ‘What Are Poets

For?,’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper

Collins, 2001), pp. 157, 92.

41 John Wylie, Landscape (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 158. See also Tim

Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill (London:

Routledge, 2000).

42 Tuma, ‘An Interview with Peter Riley’, p. 15.

231

and earth are joined but rather as a highly charged variant of

the many material paths, tracks, and ways that record the

social and symbolic meanings of place in the poem.

Nonetheless, some intimation of the numinous inevitably

attaches to Riley’s use of such mythopoeic imagery, and his

recurrent tendency to associate Alstonefield with a belief in

‘peace, messy and running-failed as it is’ (2) aligns the text

with a long tradition of pastoral depictions of place. Tom

Lowenstein notes that in the 1995 version of Alstonefield Riley’s

impulse is ‘to explore or reconstruct a midlands pastoral’;

and Simon Perril comments on his frequent dalliances with ‘the

lyric and pastoral modes’.43 Of course, it has been argued that

‘pastoral landscapes’ in the strict sense are those in which

herdsmen or their equivalents provide the focus of attention.44

But if we grant the term its wider resonances with the

cultural construction of nature and celebrations of rural

retreats then its application to Riley’s work seems

43 Tom Lowenstein, ‘Excavation and Contemplation: Peter Riley’s Distant

Points’, The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of Peter Riley (1999/2000), p. 186; Perril, ‘Trappings

of the Hart’, p. 217.

44 Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,

1996), pp. 27-8.

232

appropriate. Adopting this approach, Andrew Lawson links

Riley’s work, and that of several other Cambridge poets, to

the emergence of a distinctive expression of modern pastoral

that provides a sophisticated but ultimately familiar ‘form of

nostalgia: for small artisan cultures.’ The distinguishing

features of this ‘philosophical pastoral’ include a tendency

to lament the lack of any genuine community in contemporary

Britain and a conception of history as ‘a frozen space of

passivity and resignation’.45 There are elements of Riley’s

Alstonefield that seem to fit this general description, as when he

associates the landscapes around Alstonefield with a fragile

but enduring spirit of ‘hope’: ‘A deific glow that scutters

out of sight when you turn to face it, but integral to the

entire geology’ (4). Indeed, the poem might also be read in

the context of much older traditions of pastoral writing.

Raymond Williams notes that a key trope of pastoral writing

entails contrasting ‘the peace of country life’ with ‘the

disturbance of war and civil war and the political chaos of

the cities.’46 A weaker version of this contrast is apparent at

45 Andrew Lawson, ‘On Modern Pastoral’, fragmente 3 (1991), pp. 41, 39.

46 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: The Hogarth Press, 1993),

p. 17.

233

the moment in which Riley’s narrator thinks of Cambridge from

the geographical and emotional distance of Alstonefield: ‘It

was my wine to rest by the stone wall at/ summer’s end far

from Cambridge, where/ chthonic severance dictates endless

toil’ (11). That telling phrase, ‘chthonic severance’, implies

that returning to Alstonefield is a means by which Riley’s

narrator can reconnect with the earth at a precious distance

from the urban cares of alienated labour. In these ways, then,

Alstonefield can sometimes appear to take up ‘the discourse of

retreat’ that Terry Gifford sees as central to the

ambivalences of pastoral writing.47

Yet, if Riley often represents place through the

discourse and conventions of pastoral, he typically does so in

a highly self-conscious manner that is notably critical of the

very conventions he employs. For instance, whilst the narrator

of Alstonefield is half-humourously concerned about the ability of

certain valued places to withstand the ‘desubstantiating/

forces known collectively as shopping’ (20), his handling of

pastoral iconography is also profoundly ironic. At the opening

of Part V he visits a car boot sale in the village and fails

to be seduced by a representative figure:47 Terry Gifford, Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 46.

234

Dampening, I turn down

a plastic shepherdess at 30p and go back

to the car. And sit waiting in the rain

for something better than pastoral, some-

thing less fairground and more circus […]. (24)

The plastic shepherdess seems to imply an unexpected

congruence between traditional pastoral motifs and the ‘image

destitution’ (24) wrought by consumer capitalism, whilst the

speaker’s stated desire for ‘something better than pastoral’

is rendered ambiguous by the fact that it is expressed as he

sits in his car, itself an icon of technological modernity. Of

course, the car goes nowhere, is merely a shelter from the

rain, and the narrator’s earlier remark that ‘Petrol flips the

work-day whip/ and we poor peasants dive for the verge’ (23)

accords with the text’s perambulatory bias. Nonetheless, his

self-identification as one of those ‘poor peasants’ harried by

the pace of contemporary living is clearly also ironic,

highlighting the discrepancy between pastoral tropes and

observable conditions in typical anti-pastoral style.48 At the

48 Anti-pastoral can take a number of forms, but they all share the intent

to expose ‘the distance between reality and the pastoral convention’.

Gifford, Pastoral, p. 128.

235

same time, Riley uses pastoral as a means to address the

effects of the pollution and reckless exploitation that are

everywhere evident in this supposedly protected area of the

Peak District: ‘So, poetry, grey chemicals on the grass/ an

abandoned centre which is where/ we live’ (18).49 Indeed, the

two registers of irony or parody and environmental protest

converge when the narrator pleads against a return to

Cambridge in lines that succinctly deconstruct poems by Yeats

and Wordsworth: ‘let me wander still in the open/ fields of

failure, where the linnet coughs at eve/ and the daffydil

hides its condom’ (25).50 Here, Riley’s criticism is double-

edged, highlighting the despoliation of natural landscapes on

49 The importance of pastoral to environmentally-conscious writing and

criticism, particularly in North America, is discussed in Lawrence Buell,

The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture

(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1995), pp. 31-52.

50 The references are to W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, which

imagines an idyllic island retreat where ‘evening [is] full of the linnet’s

wings’, and William Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, in which

the poet-speaker famously encounters a ‘host’ of ‘golden daffodils’. W.B.

Yeats, The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: J.M. Dent, 1994), p. 60;

William Wordsworth, Selected Poems, ed. John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1994), p. 207.

236

the one hand, and deflating those literary representations

that promote their idealisation on the other.

The other means by which Riley tempers his use of

pastoral conventions is through recurrent references to issues

of ownership, land politics, and trespass. As Williams

observes, since the seventeenth century a dominant strand in

pastoral writing has ‘offered a description and thence an

idealisation of actual English country life and its social and

economic relations.’51 It is against the persistence of such

idealisations in much contemporary pastoral discourse that

Riley’s concerns with the freedom to roam are pitted. Just

prior to his attendance at the car boot sale, the narrator of

Alstonefield surveys the unpastoral farmyards outlying the village

and quips: ‘It would be specious to pretend/ that any bit of

British countryside is anything/ but an agricultural factory

marked Piss Off’ (23). In these lines, industrialism is not

something that threatens to intrude upon the peace of the

countryside from without but rather a force that manages,

shapes, and owns it already, excluding the pastoral pedestrian

with an aggressive defence of its property rights. Seen in

this light, Alstonefield’s emphasis upon walking and wandering51 Williams, The Country and the City, p. 26.

237

takes on a more obviously politicised aspect, for as Solnit

observes, walking tends to infringe and disrupt ‘the boundary

lines of ownership that break the land into pieces’ and

focuses instead upon the paths by which unauthorised

trajectories and connections may be followed.52 The themes of

trespass and property rights are also broached in the

separately published ‘Alstonefield Part VI’ in which the

narrator describes walking ‘unobserved (fearing the shouts of

angry farmers) over/ the stone-boxed fields’ in order to reach

the ‘sheltered summit’ of Steep Low, which overlooks the

village.53 In such passages, Riley’s solitary walkers are

implicitly aligned with outlaw figures such as poachers and

vagabonds, infringing lawful boundaries that they thereby call

into question. Towards the end of Alstonefield, Riley’s speaker

suggests that the ultimate reason ‘for travelling, walking the

night’ is a search for ‘justice’ (91), and this search seems

bound up with the text’s involved exploration of common land

and public footways. For these, however attenuated and

endangered they are, imply the possibility of ‘creating

52 Solnit, Wanderlust, p. 162.

53 Peter Riley, The Day’s Final Balance: Uncollected Writings 1965-2006 (Exeter:

Shearsman Books, 2007), pp. 142, 140.

238

liberal space instead’ (39), in which the bounds of place

would remain porous and open to renegotiation by all.54

In Riley’s poetry, then, the poetics of place often

coincide with the politics of place through issues of access,

ownership, and use. As a writer acutely attuned to the

contested meanings of place, he combines neo-modernist

experiment with an intent to extend or refurbish the more

traditional genres of lyric and pastoral. Although aspects of

Alstonefield reveal a characteristic tendency to oppose the refuge

and serenity of rural places to the frenetic pace of urban

modernity, and to equate natural landscapes with the numinous,

his deployment of pastoral tropes and conventions is typically

self-conscious and ironic. A strain of anti-pastoral critique

is also prominent in the portrait he draws of an

54 Given the detailed research that informs his Peak District poems, Riley

would certainly be aware of the historical precedent for his narrator’s

trespasses in the 1932 mass trespass on Kinder Scout in the Dark Peak

organised by the British Workers’ Sports Federation. On the symbolic and

cultural importance of this event see Solnit, Wanderlust, pp. 165-67; and

David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), pp. 71-

2. A more detailed insider’s account can be found in Benny Rothman, The 1932

Kinder Scout Trespass: A Personal View of the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass (Altrincham: Willow

Publishing, 1982).

239

industrialised countryside in which humankind has scattered

its communities, polluted its natural environment, and carved

up the land into bundles of private property. Riley’s

recurrent interests in the act of trespass and, more

extensively, in walking through the landscape, following its

criss-crossing paths and seeking out areas of common land,

work in opposition to this contemporary status quo,

elaborating an emphatically public conception of what it is to

inhabit and practice place. As Massey argues, place shapes

individual and collective identities not through any innate

form of mystical belonging, but ‘through the practising of place,

the negotiation of intersecting trajectories; place as an

arena where negotiation is forced upon us.’55 Riley’s Alstonefield

illustrates this dynamic, open conception of place in terms of

its preoccupation with ideas of convergence and radiation,

where places are understood as nodes or clusters of relations

that0link up to a myriad of239others and elsewhepes. Place is

‘where lives converge’; where the human and the non-human, the

Local and the global meeu and interqct.

55 Massey, for space, p. 154.