"Proof..."

'How do you get mortal harmony

out of a stone box into the moving air?

With ash and ink, and sing a lyric air with passion.'

"Proof..." asks and answers this question in 27 short poems as only poetry can. It is an account in the simplest, declarative language of the wren's song, the life in transit of the refugee, mortality, the poet's task, the fall of Constantinople, the Manchester Insurrection and the forgotten books. "Proof..." brims with the temerity to suggest that all these lives, all these events, matter, that they are all connected and that poetry is the medium of this vision.

'And it is through

this hole in the night that the wren sings.'

--Kelvin Corcoran

Peter Riley lives in Yorkshire. Shearsman Books published his Collected Poems in two volumes in 2018. His Truth, Justice and the Companionship of Owls was published by Longbarrow Press in 2019.