The Glacial Stairway

Featuring a decade’s worth of work by British poet Peter Riley, this collection explores the pressures of history, culture, language, and place on the traveler through questioning lyrical poems and monologues. Most of these pieces derive from the experience of unfamiliar places from highland to wilderness, notably the Pyrenees, the Apennines, Derbyshire, Haute Provence, and the American West. Riley is keenly conscious of natural surroundings, and this compilation becomes a venue for the self-questioning of place and person.