This week's poet, Peter Riley, was suggested by Billy Mills. Riley is an approachable writer, linked to a "school" popularly associated with obscurity, but that's not to say his work isn't complex. It merits more than the brevity of a column, and, by choosing a diptych, I feel bound to fall short. But I was fascinated by many aspects of these two poems, and the relationship between them – so here they are.
"The Road…" and "The Road (remix)" are from Riley's latest collection, The Glacial Stairway, where they are printed on facing pages. Both consist of seven tercets, and so are visually as well as thematically similar. It's important for the reader's eye and ear to travel between the two. A little effort will be needed to imagine the format here.
Peter Riley is a poet fascinated by process, and how different processes interact. His poems often document journeys or passages of time. The new book begins with a trek over the Pyrenees, and there are walking poems set in Italy, Provence and London, as well as a "road" poem from the US. The reader inevitably becomes aware of the book as a journey, the poem as a staging-post and not necessarily a terminus.
Riley typically notes small as well as significant details as he travels, but in these two poems objects have gained symbolic weight. The road to Baghdad is, in part, a symbolic road. Desert, vultures, stars, stones, water, the dove and the black eagle: these are both fact and archetype. Their resonance, enhanced by a structure of repetitions and pauses, gives the poems an elegiac, almost keening quality, and moves the reader to defer analysis. The poet works both with and against this tendency. The difficult question that begins "The Road…" asks, "Is it level?" - not the first question that comes to mind in the context. We have to think about it. "Level" suggests truthfulness, trustworthiness, fair play – as well as physical flatness. (The political undertone is later picked up by "Is this journey legal?") Another question for the reader is the identity of "they", the subject of the next question: "Do they/ kneel beside it to their own passions?" Soldiers taking cover, civilians praying, mourners weeping over the dead? "Inkwells of light" and "the rose that becomes a route" suggest explosions: the paradox is that they produce illumination. Riley has included some fragments from the Syrian-Lebanese poet, Adonis (see end-note). The reference to inkwells (whether or not a quotation from Adonis) is therefore not merely self-referential. Poetry is a possible route, and language an essential one.
Asking if the journey is permitted, the speaker might be asking if hope is possible. He seems to say that it is, but there is no transformation to be achieved other than through hell, through touching rock-bottom: "All that's left/ of Palestine, a few small red flowers close/ to the ground, a seething patience." The image of kneeling, now repeated, is certainly this time suggestive of prayer. The road crosses battle-lines and psychological barriers, perhaps, in "the dark traverse". Redemption is part of the dialectic which the next poem complicates, particularly when it meditates on the Jews of eastern Europe and their erasure: "Not a board nailed to an upright."
"The Road (remix)" is not simply a revision. A revision can roam as far from the original as the poet wishes, and usually covers its tracks. The "remix" takes very specific elements from the unobliterated original, combining them to make a new "space in sung words".
It asks a new question, too, this time at a higher pitch, with a simpler dismay, as it almost echoes the nursery-chant, "How many miles to Babylon?" In a war-struck landscape, outside and inside may horribly change places; body parts are "flung out of transport systems…" and houses collapse back to stones and sand, "the stained floor of the desert". Now the soldier is addressed, and it's his home we see, razed to a tumble of stones. The imagery is picked up in the image of the cairns, and glances back at the "stone syllables" which allowed death to cross the river in the first poem.
The political and ethical remix underlines the complexity of reconciliation. The "wooden flute serenading death" is a beautiful image that embodies an obscenity: death should not be serenaded. But the song of elegy is different: that is necessary.
The fact that there are two poems, not saying identical things, but often meeting in their thought and imagery, is a literal reminder of the affinities within the enmity of war. The second poem dispossesses the first, excavates and re-shapes the same material. It suggests, also, fruitful change and connection, as when the "few small red flowers" seem to morph into the ghostly, impossible wreath of rose-petals and bone. The moral imperative remains the same. It is "patience" – this time not "seething," but quietly echoing "pain," the two words occupying the same line. As the last verse of the first poem imagined the fragrance of the simmering but never-to-be-shared coffee, now a whole stanza encompasses a vision of peace: the dove with its aching throat, the sounds of "pouring water" and "wings in the air." But the road of the poems is no simple line from despair to hope. They are a mosaic of symbols, and, haiku-like, combine disparate images in a single picture which, we have to accept, is as paradoxical, as hopeless and promising, as "the human condition" itself.
The Road…
The road to Baghdad, is it level? Do they
kneel beside it to their own passions, ink-
wells of light, the rose that becomes a route?
Only the wounded pass through the gate showing
their red passports, only the killed arrive home
and take their mothers' coffee.
The stained floor of the desert, vultures wheeling
over the tank routes, forgotten tunes in the
far hills. Death steps over the river on stone syllables.
Sky full of stars, body parts flung out of transport systems
or suburban markets, dissolving into the greater
and closer light, moon on silent prophet's tomb.
Is this journey legal? Is it permitted? All that's left
of Palestine, a few small red flowers close
to the ground, a seething patience.
Kneel among them and beg for such patience
while the dove sings in the cedar, the song
of Yes, there will be pain, yes,
There will be horror at the dark traverse.
The coffee simmers on the heater,
its perfume fills the room.
The Road (remix)
How long, Babylon, how much more
blood soaking into sand, glitter-
ing safety on the floor?
A goat bleating under an olive tree
beside a ruined wall at the end
of a dry track, soldier,
This is the home you fought for,
grey stones tumbled on the ground
and a wooden flute serenading death.
The black eagle flies from cairn to cairn
with red messages: we shall make
our final space in sung words.
And in the vast green plains and hills of
eastern Europe the Jewish population
completely eradicated, not a stone on a stone
Not a board nailed to an upright. A wreath
of rose petals and bone for what remains.
Take it in patience, listen to the pain
In the dove's throat, water
pouring from the well, beating
of wings in air.
Note: The first three lines of "The Road…" are adapted translations of four phrases from the poems on pages 111 and 112 of Adonis, Le Livre (al-Kitâb) traduit de l'arabe de Houria Abdelouahed (Seuil 2007).