Peter Riley: ‘I suppose the writing of narrative poetry became a lost art around 1925-1935, last seen from such poets as Yeats, John Masefield, Lawrence Binyon, E.A. Robinson and Robinson Jeffers. That is, real narrative poetry in the tradition filtered down from Homer, and not including accounts of personal experience, transcended or symbolised or interior narratives, anecdotal verse such as Edgar Lee Masters and Osbert Sitwell wrote, or very long poems from Scotland saying what’s wrong with the world.’

Peter Riley: An undetached calm is the signal feature of his poetry in the first half of the 1960s, as he carefully learns to hold language and syntax in his own terms, and the instances and concerns of the provincial and unprofessional life he lives are more and more projected outwards towards reader and world as linguistic vectors. He is clearly moving, in no rush but determinedly, towards a version of the local which remains local but of greater reach. He remained local for ever; even on the other side of the earth thirty years later…’

Peter Riley: ‘It is as if a world-wide culture has sprung up in poetry which whatever the traditions of particular zones were at one time, now produces a very straightforward poetry of declarations, accounts, confessions, etc., free from interference from poetical forms, highly figurative or imaginative language, word-play or phonetic play, syntactical unorthodoxy, difficulty, literary reference, landscape, and in some cases quite free from any concept of beauty in the idea of what is a poem. Many amount to plain histories of the defeated self, especially in exile.’