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Andrew Motion

Passing Measures

Peter Riley

Cover Picture of Passing Measures
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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  • Day and night the sky arches over
    Hills and plain turning against
    The earth, clouds springing
    From the dark wooded edge fan
    Over the farmed land and at
    Night the plethora of stars
    Turns clear and sure and
    Compact in their terraces
    Above a veiled and separated ground
    O fine in their farming the stars
    Rally and exit all night.


    from 'Roofwatch'

                 
    Peter Riley's Passing Measures offers an opportunity to take stock of the work he has published over the last thirty years. His poetry arises from places inhabited or visited (historical landscapes of central England, far west Wales, southern France, Tunisia, European urban centres), from art and things man made (music, Roman churches, Irish paintings) and inner experience.

    He is chiefly interested in making a poetry which is 'available' rather than 'accessible'. The poem offers the reader entry into an experience of the world mediated by the passionate needs of the shaping spirit, while seeking to avoid a reductive or confirming complicity. 'I look upon myself,' he says, 'as writing in the central tradition of poetry in English, especially with regard to the "wrought" or "aureate" text, my version of which is essentially a meditative construct concerning individual experience in place and time, reaching into an ethic of care.'
    PETER RILEY was born in 1940 near Manchester. He studied at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and the universities of Keele and Sussex. He has taught at the University of Odense (Denmark) and since 1975 has lived as a freelance writer and poetry bookseller, from which he retired in 2008. He lived in ... read more
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