Peter Riley was born 1940, Stockport, near Manchester, in an environment of working people, and entered higher education through Britain’s post-war socialistic educational policies. He read English at Cambridge and has since lived and worked in UK and abroad in various kinds of teaching and casual employment. Since 1985 he has lived in Cambridge, where he recently closed down a mail-order poetry book business. He has written studies of Jack Spicer, T.F. Powys, improvised music, poetry, lead mines, burial mounds, village carols and Transylvanian string bands, and has published two books of translations from the French poet Lorand Gaspar. He also edited the poetry of Nicholas Moore (1918–86).

Writes Jon Thompson, "Like Beckett, Riley's vision and voice works to isolate the human figure within a confined space and then explores, in seemingly endless set of permutations, the meaning of that confinement. When not relieved by mordant humor, the typical Beckettian tone is bleak, but the exuberance and richness of the language plays against that bleakness, effectively unsettling it. While I find a comic voice only at the margins of these poems, Riley's work exploits the same friction between tone and language that one finds in Beckett's work. And like Beckett, Riley's poetry evinces a radical skepticism toward the sufficiency of certainty, particularly the certainties born out of rationalism. In Riley's poetry, however, the "dream of certainty" (Poem 41) cherished by the ancient peoples is invested with a mythological richness whereas the rationalistic form of certainty emerges as a form of hubris and self-delusion, if not cultural death.

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Links

• Peter Riley in conversation with Keith Tuma