John Riley's poetry is one of the most interesting and substantial achievements from the whole range of experimental writing produced in England during the last twenty years. Owing little to and largely ignored by the literary establishment, Riley's work expresses an admiration for the intentions and techniques of Americans such as Ezra Pound, George Oppen, and Charles Olson (for whom he wrote a fine memorial poem), and a passionately unacademic interest in a range of foreign poetry, including French and German (he translated Friedrich Hölderlin extensively), but focusing finally on the Russian poetry of the twentieth century, from which he translated work by writers such as Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Vladislav Khodasevich, and, particularly, Osip Mandelshtam. Underlying such cosmopolitan elements is a spiritual concern so deep-rooted that it led him increasingly to view social and political matters (indeed, finally, to view everything) as intelligible only in...