Peter Riley's The Day's Final Balance
Paperback, 212pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $21
ISBN-13 9781905700097; ISBN-10 19057002097
Shearsman
Melissa Flores-Bórquez & Edmund Hardy
This is a book "uncollected" pieces, various writings and rewritings from 65 to 06. There is Alstonefield Part VI which is and isn't a part of the Alstonefield sequence ("I think this is a separate poem, but which retains its title because of its continuity from, and references to, Alstonefield:a poem [I–V]"). There is a sequence of pithy, very short poems, and an intriguing block of seven seven-syllable line poems which have been "over-written" on British poems of the 40s and 50s. There are thirteen distinct sections to the book – a kind of Reader – prose, walk, lyric, songs (actually) to be sung.
What I notice is a kind of elegiac wit in many of these pieces, and it works to make a series of abstract relations between images and the epanodos of terms (such as love, day, world*) appear, not as a bundle of non-sequiturs, but bound into a kind of index-vision (of faithless value) through the character of address – which involves the attenuation of apocalyptic symptoms of the originary which signal themselves but then run into parts of clarity.
* but also many others specific to each poem
M.F-B.
Royal Signals: From the war diary of Arthur Riley (1906-1983).
"This work, written on 6th April 1984, is a collage and narration of phrases taken from the diary my father left behind of his experiences as a soldier (radio operator) in North Africa, Italy and Palestine 1943-1945." There is one italicised intervention towards the end of the piece – at the moment of Victory – which changes the overall impression considerably, as a lens passed over the poem. The phrases we are given are ones of location, description, status; songs sung.
By road to TunisiaRoyal Signals was published, I believe, in a small run in 1995, which I haven't seen. Now collected into the middle of The Day's Final Balance, it runs to ten pages. Private signals from Royal service, beginning with
(500 miles)
Through Atlas Mountains
(storks' nest on house roof)
Arrived at Ghardimoua
(concentration point)
1943. Trucks to docks.and ending,
Passed through Paris at nighta series of markings with a different life either side.
Demobbed.
Royal Signals does contain common elements familiar from other war diaries – from different ranks and arms of the military – such as the initial making strange journey to the front or theatre, followed by a registering of the many dead which now must be known by the senses. The war diaries which do not follow these patterns are those which are part of the institutional fabric itself, the unit diaries officially kept, necessary mass observation of personnel and terrain, containing maps, morale reports, and so on.
Holy CityUnlike a poem which might juxtapose sources – a Second World War piece such as Jorie Graham's ‘Spoken from the Hedgerows’ (in Overlord, soldiers' testimony as one plane), or Riley's own experiment in documentary voicing, Excavations, the poetry of Royal Signals is an archival publicising of one record, a document of state mobilisation. As such it doesn't attempt to disperse the historicity of the presented text, the danger of a dispersion into cross-cut ornament.
cheer our way
Bathed and washed clothes in stream
Slept in barn
Sets closed down
Refugees returning with cart-loads of furniture
Truck over-turns returningThe lines are fragments wrinkled by the forceful interlacing of hierarchical harm.
from Tunis
eight injured (Hiscox badly)
Hut across valley
celebrating all night –
drums and wailing
Quiet day, washing, mending, etc.
E.H.
