About Poetry

The purpose of About Poetry is to offer a contextual account of the poetry of Peter Riley. Of course, it is a poetry that speaks for itself, but in About Poetry we also have the voice of the poet himself in counterpoint. To understand aspects of the origin of that voice led to the inclusion of two autobiographical essays. The essays and interviews are not only about Peter Riley's poetry, its transition through five decades, but also the landscape of contemporary poetry. Much of what is said here explores the poetics of that landscape, its achievements, contradictions, creative diversions and its vitality.

"I think the way to read poetry is with very bad eyesight, so you have to screw up your brows and peer at the words in front of your face one by one, filling the visual field, the black quarry before you and the pale air all around. So that you would only go to this trouble with a telegram of some concern. And secondly to believe everything you hear for as long as you can." -Peter Riley, XIV PIECES, Longbarrow Press, 2012.

Peter Riley is one of the most important British poets of the past 50 years. He was born in Stockport in 1940 and educated at Stockport Grammar School, Pembroke College Cambridge and the universities of Sussex and Keele. His first book, Love-Strife Machine, was published in 1969 and his two-volume Collected Poems in 2018, drawing upon the extensive number of remarkable books published over nearly five decades. He has lived in Denmark and different parts of England including Cambridge, the Peak District and Hebden Bridge. These experiences and his travels in Transylvania, Italy, France and Greece are explored in his poetry alongside other abiding themes of social justice, music, the lives of others and the primacy of poetry itself. In addition, Riley has been a prolific writer of incisive poetry reviews and was the poetry editor for The Fortnightly Review from 2012 to 2024.

Kelvin Corcoran lives in Greece. His first book was published in 1985 and his Collected Poems in 2023, drawing upon fifteen previous volumes. His work has been commended in the UK by the Poetry Society, the Forward Prize committee and commissioned by Medicine Unboxed. It is the subject of a study edited by Andy Brown, The Writing Occurs as Song. Corcoran has edited an account of Lee Harwood's poetry in Not the Full Story: Six Interviews with Lee Harwood, 2008, and is co-editor with Robert Sheppard of the New Collected Poems of Lee Harwood. His work has been anthologised in the UK and the USA and translated into Greek.