"The Glacial Stairway" takes the reader on journeys in verse and prose, over a mountain pass in the Pyrenees, from King's Cross to the School of Oriental and African Studies; to the seasons of eighth-century China by way of a series of twentieth-cent...

"Alstonefield: A Poem" is a long poem in ten-line stanzas which explores Riley's preoccupation with a limestone village in Dovedale. Like much of Riley's writing, it has close affinities with Prynne's, Nevertheless, there is more of Cowper in this ve...