Peter Riley: ‘We remain knowing where we are and what is happening while the linguistic medium twists and treks through a fairground of figures and glosses and verbal diversions which may derive from the story directly as metaphors, or indirectly as ornaments, or sometimes apparently not at all.’

Peter Riley: ‘In Breen, “it is not the hard objectivity by which some poets (such as Karl O’Hanlon) seek to drive the power of self from the poem by ever new twists and faults of language, in search of accuracy.”‘

Peter Riley: ‘Vahni Capildeo’s contrariety is an exemplary way of coping with a cultural condition which seeks to package and label experience according to unsubtle and restrictive categories. She simply says “Yes No” to it, and in the process, with the help of her multicultural resources, produces poems and prose of expansive eloquence and sometimes challenging complexity, which insist on the multi-form, Protean status of the lived realities, as well as the bare paradox-songs and stories…’

Peter Riley: ‘ I don’t just mean placid, gentle or any suchlike gloss. It’s possible to speak of a mental calm in the act of composition which opens the mind to progressive thought and enlarges its resources by overcoming the inhibitions created by anxiety. It’s a quality of the text rather than the author, though I think certain mental habits must be conducive to it. It’s not by any means incompatible with protest or even anger. This definition will not be found in any dictionary and I might have invented it, but the word “serene” could hold some hint of it.’

Peter Riley: ‘In most critical accounts of English poetry, the period called “the 1940s” has for a long time been considered a disaster. The conventional history is that all was going well enough with Auden, Spender, Day Lewis et al., and suddenly under the cover of war a race of demented poets were let loose who produced incomprehensible ravings which cannot be taken seriously for a moment. In fact the 1940s was not a disaster zone for poetry, it was a disaster zone for criticism, which was caused initially by moves in academia, especially Cambridge, to apply the established forensic expertise in locating literary frauds through the centuries to current production, thus assuming the right to intervene, with praise and blame as appropriate, in the production and reception of new poetry.’

Peter Riley: ‘The consistency of [Christopher Middleton’s] work over some seventy years of writing is a sign of a firm sense of purpose, a purpose for poetry in the individual mind which is against harm, and proposes the stabilisation of the tottering edifice by moving a rational, unified discourse into a multiplied one for its truth to experience, which is then entitled to declare its position. It remains a question and a hope…’