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There are, or were, something like
20,000 Bronze Age round barrows spread across Britain, in particular on chalk
upland. Many have been destroyed, and others ruined by optimistic digging for
buried treasure, but many too have been carefully excavated, for example by
the Victorian archaeologists of the Yorkshire Wolds who supply Peter Riley's
base material. The barrow contents are varied and puzzling, suggesting
a complex
cultural language. Bodies, body parts and other objects were disposed
significantly, yet enigmatically, and have inspired numerous theories. The
mounds themselves are (presumably) conclusions of a process, but modern terms
that tend to arise, such as 'burial', 'ceremony', 'family', 'religion' are
all questionably apposite. We don't know much about what was going on. Riley
has some fertile ideas of his own, for example about two polarities (N-S and
E-W), or about a funerary 'theatre' that waited for corpses. For example, of
a huge mound of chalk raised over the body of a one-year-old child:
the incomplete and
fragmented utterance of this child's future. Who
happened to die
when this tumulus was needed. Or not. Sentry on the
ridge-top, facing
dawn. And another cold morning spread its grey
distances into the
thanking heart.
[from 146]
You've seen that 'Or not' before, of course; it's been one of
the standard moves (along with incomplete and fragmented utterance) by which
modern
poets
have prevented their linguistic play from descending to definition. But here
it conveys something more specific, namely a hypothesis: that when this
tumulus was needed the child was killed for it.
My point in saying all this is that if you want to like poems in a modern
idiom but you also like a book that seems to be about something, then you
should seriously think about getting hold of this one. Excavations is blatantly
content-rich.
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Most likely you already own some of Excavations, because Iain
Sinclair's 1996 Conductors of Chaos anthology contained a dozen or
so early drafts of the final 181 prose poems. They were pretty astonishing,
and some of us have been waiting for the whole book ever since. But in a way
this selection made a misleading impression. For example, what looked like
wildly fanciful section-numbering turns out to refer soberly to numbered
tumuli. I suppose the question does arise whether a dozen of Excavations mightn't seem
just about enough.
Peter Riley is the most Wordsworthian poet of his generation. He is very
unlike Wordsworth, and perhaps I could write the obverse of this paragraph,
but I'll write this one first. Like Wordsworth he is intensely serious; the
extensive beauty of the writing is not lush, and it steers close to a plain,
even prosaic, idiom – but it's the kind of beauty that keeps its quiet
lustre. The fundamental concerns of life and society are never far off. Like
Wordsworth his poetry often centres on the ordinary bereavements and
tragedies of ordinary people. The adjective 'pastoral' occurs at various
levels, but not what has been slightingly called 'conservative pastoral'.
Like Wordsworth he is a poet who, you think, bloody-mindedly knows what he's
doing and expects the world to fit in. No time for the Byrons: 'as if corrupt
statecraft weren't the natural result of two centuries of artistic
bohemianism' (105). He probably does mean that. Like Wordsworth, the poetry
if not the poet is capable of prodigious feats of sobriety, and sometimes the
pomposity-warning-light seems to be on the blink. But if Excavations starts
to happen for you, you won't bother much about that.
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Yearning for a
pitch that wasn't/can't be, seeking a tenseless junction.
Finding nothing | Writes
in the dust an
oval ditch, wider E-W than N-S,
into solid chalk a white ellipse on the
otherwise yielding text. Promises
are rarely actual.
Striving to maintain social justice when law is the
king's new clothes If
ye love me [keep
my commandements]
so where the
|centre| at the
(where the/ true, whole, entity →body, or statement,
would be is a
patch of earth very hard, as if puddled, to a foot's eight
is where we
danced that night. And in that metope the promise born,
and I (I) shall
give you <<another comforter>> e'en the sprit of
Truth and
yearning cease). The moon in the branches of the small
pin
e,for instance,
or the dripping tap in the stone house. Unbroken
ring,repeated:
spirit of, lower case, home. Accept the offer at point
of departure.
Have it where it says the moment's extraordinary
r
each..Says death shall
not die, and every jarring love is worded.
[136]
I'm quoting this mainly to give you an idea of what Excavations looks
like. The poems resemble chunks of a conglomerate stone composed principally
of three
materials, but naturally with a few other traces as well. The text in
standard font is what binds everything together, and is predominantly a
modern voice, not too darn poetic, opinionated, emotional, groping for
definition, perhaps jotting down swift entries in a writer's notebook. The
italicized text normally comes straight out of the archaeological reports;
solid, dry and factual. The emboldened text consists typically of fragments
of generalized lamentation taken from sixteenth-century lyrics (e.g. for
all the teares my eyes have ever wept), but there are plenty of exceptions
to this and, in the poem above, they come from St John's Gospel.
The poems run together like pages of a book, often explicitly so. They invite
non-sequential reading, so sometimes I'm just seeing the reports, or just
the embedded quotations; at other times I might blank them and try to make
sense
of what's left. These reading-games are possible, so it seems reasonable to
try them out.
In the case of number 136 we might notice that the words from John 14 are
concerned with how the disciples should behave when Jesus is dead. They are
concerned with a coming bereavement, and the Holy Ghost is spoken of as a
comforter. The desire for comfort, for an impossible negation of death in a
'tenseless junction', is also the subject of the first sentence of the poem.
Jesus' promises are contingent on law-abiding behaviour ('keep my
commandements') and it's plain that the bronze-age relics reflect a community
bound and cheered by a system of laws (the dancing floor at the centre of the
ditch). But a certain resistance to this vision of law-abiding acquiescence
swirls through the poem. Promises aren't much. Politicians enjoy preaching
to us about obeying the rule of law and getting solid employment, though they
themselves seem to be above both. And then, Writes in the dust refers to the
woman taken in adultery (John 8), a cardinal instance of Jesus' highly
ambiguous relationship to the rule of law. Riley secularizes the comforter
into bourgeois instances of the melancholy beauty with which truth may
sometimes ease the bereaved ('The moon in the branches of the small pine, for
instance..') Well, that's something. The poem ends with the unsparing 'death
shall not die' (a reversal of Donne's famous holy sonnet); this is made to
sound positive, however, and perhaps the irreversibility of death is the only
way of accommodating all our 'jarring loves'; we couldn't have our own lives,
with their unique network of piercing affections, if the dead didm't make
room for us. 'Have it where it says the moment's extraordinary reach' is a
complex sentence. It suggests a highly time-bound way of living ('enjoy the
moment' in adspeak terms) but it also hints that the moment of someone's life
in fact has a 'reach' forward in time to where someone else may interact with
it.
This is a very limited unpacking of a complicated poem, though it's the best
I can manage at the moment. Even so, it's enough to make the poems around
it begin to seem replete with joined meanings – the text begins to
belly with life like a flysheet. The moon is moving behind a hill in 134
(it's always
getting behind things). In 137, the offers and promises of 136 are once again
called to account, and are said to 'do what surf does on the hand'. The
puddled earth and the dance reappear in 145 (perhaps the underlining visually
evokes the 'hardpan' floor). Of death as a necessary finality, we meet this
formulation: 'Death's hand steadying the earth, take it without fear' (139).
Bereavement is omnipresent in this part of Excavations, and
pregnantly so in 142 and 144, which quote the verses from 2 Samuel 18-19
where David grieves wildly for his son Absalom – who did not keep his
commandments. (Riley in the notes says 'Jonathan', but that's a slip; both
the political and familial context of the quotations are vital.)
I have so far avoided mentioning the obvious point that after Jesus speaks
the words quoted in 136 he goes out to die, and to rise from the dead. In a
hundred different ways the poems of Excavations keep coming up
against the notion of life after death. You could say that it's built into
the very structure of the poem, because poetry always tend to animate what
it talks about, which in this case is mainly corpses. Even the excavator Canon
Greenwell writing, for example, of 'the body of a young woman [ENE/SSE]
her face in contact with the child's head' (129) puts into our minds, not
a bone, but a face; not location, but touch. And
furthermore, the central images of the poem, both the barrows and their
exhumations, are testaments to a belief in the ongoing significance of the
dead.
Peter Riley talks of reading each poem as a choric ode over exhumed remains,
but that's something I haven't felt any inclination to do, though it sounds
worthy. Wandering across the bowl barrows in my own neighbourhood, it isn't
Peter Riley's words that come to mind, or anyone else's particularly. It's
difficult to feel the communal submersion in another's words that Riley
atavistically proposes. I feel rather alone and I'm content with that. It
might help if he'd given his words a tune. Prose poetry doesn't seem the
obvious way to deliver it. Surely we end up more in the analytical posture
of the excavator than the participatory posture of celebrants? But perhaps
this
is starting to say more about the reviewer than the book.
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All the pieces I've homed in on have been from the second part of Excavations,
which seems to me critical. The poems of the first part are dryer, more airy,
as if they
are scratching about in a locale but haven't yet accepted an involvement.
Picking it up from where we were, there's a large discernible shape to what
follows, if you read quickly enough. At 150 Riley makes potent use of Gunnar
Ekelof's extraordinary 1951 poem 'A Dream' in which the dreamer has an
intimate, indescribably stale, experience of contact with the dead. The poems
in this region attain maximal stress. From 162 onwards a calmer clarity is
reached; it begins
Where the light
returns to the eye like a tear running back in, the
foramen ovale re-opens
and the singing echoes back through hollows
in the earth
to the pain centre now stilled, funnelled to a point of nil
gravity, an immense
weight lifted ...massive exostosis on the shaft of
the left tibia,
agglutinating the lower third of the fibula The
sorrowes,
which themsealvs
for vs have wrought
The continuation of this quote asserts a more distanced perspective ('Sorrow
was my revendge, and wo my hate'), and the poems that end the
sequence, curiously exalted, are also responsibly concerned with social
matters Ð mirroring in a surprising way the closing movement of Wordsworth's
much under-estimated poem of grief, The Excursion. I've
under-represented the range of tones in Excavations, so for a
final extract (and to show that it's not all as formidably multi-threaded as
what I've shown so far), here's an extract from 171:
No home but the
struggle but
no struggle worth half a thought that isn't
to spread home
across the earth, wherever the light wind creeps and
the broken leaf
settles, to sit there in justice. A whole and singular
thing, a self. That
stays itself and stays sited as the world offers faster
and faster
transport to nowhere in particular. And the fast transport
shakes the earth
until the self and the roof and the steps of the
Institute slide
into nonentity in a smoke, a cleansing smoke a smoke
for getting rid of
people. That drifts across the town most natural
seeming of a Sunday
afternoon, raising a smile in the ethical couple,
that their
dependence is full of continuing labour and the planet well
mined. The smoke
comes from behind a wall where some self fell an
inconvenience to
the great hurry.
'Ethical' is plainly denigratory there, but the sequence is still restless,
and in 174 the ethical comes up for consideration again, but this time in a
more probing connexion; the poem is about Antigone. But there's a
fancifulness in these last poems ('That strange habit of counting in sixes
and twelves, always plus a unit to the hand measures') And perhaps rest
arrives in the word 'core', from these final lines:
And lie there, in
more space than you need, your history forming an
empty cavity offset
behind your back like a rucksack as you religiously
face SE and sneeze
for luck. Fall no other way but back to the lapse,
where nothing is
surer, the core and sudden end of love. Through a
thin stratum of
dried blood, tomorrow turns over.
[from 175]
In fact this isn't quite the end of Excavations, and I'm
making the movement sound too orthodox. But perhaps the final six 'preludial
flotations' can be left dark, to assure you of getting your money's worth
without the irritating sensation that someone else has already had it. I did
try, but I've barely scuffed the surface of an astonishingly sustained and
purposeful operation.
© Michael Peverett 2004
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