Shearsman Books

Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700158

The Llyn Writings is a complete collection of all Peter Riley's writings that have resulted from annual visits to the Llyn Peninsula in North Wales between 1977 and 1998 – ordinary family holidays in a coastal caravan, but taking the notion of pilgrimage from that terrain (since Llyn leads to Bardsey Island, a major medieval pilgrimage goal) into the possibilities and difficulties of a modern sense of ultimate purpose. The core of the collection consists of three poem-sequences ('Sea Watches', 'Sea Watch Elegies', 'Between Harbours'), but added to these are all the notebook pieces, the spin-off poems, prose meditations and descriptions, lists of details – at times like an annual report on the changes and survivals of the area – plus topographical and historical notes.

These are not empirical poems in the accepted English mode, not 'what I did on my holidays' poems. Rather Peter Riley's poems-of-place are where topography and meditation meet. They are where the imagination takes flight and where time collapses into a vortex of perception. In one sense anchored in reality, these poems depart for other realms, carried there on wings of prayer perhaps, in the fashion of a pilgrimage offering.

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