[4] He has written studies of Jack Spicer, T. F. Powys, improvised music, poetry, lead mines, burial mounds, village carols and Transylvanian string bands, and has published two books of translations from the French poet Lorand Gaspar.
Prynne's Marzipan and his sole poem in Chinese, Jie ban mi Shi Hu; R. F. Langley's Man Jack; and late work by the older poets Seán Rafferty and Dorian Cooke.
Distant Points is a series of prose poems arising from the author's meditations on 19th century excavation reports of prehistoric burial mounds in the north of England.
As Riley himself explains, this particular work is: "... concerned with the human burial deposits of the so-called Neolithic/Bronze Age culture of what is now the Yorkshire Wolds, as documented in two books of late 19th Century tumulus excavation accounts: by J. R. Mortimer (1905) and Canon William Greenwell (1877).
"Commenting on this work, American poet and Zukofsky scholar Mark Scroggins offers this insight: Each poem is titled with the numerical designation of an individual excavation, and combines verbatim descriptions of the mound's contents – often eliciting a good deal of unintentional (to their original authors) pathos – with linguistic material Riley draws from any number of other sources: various works on Renaissance music, Ezra Pound, Søren Kierkegaard, Jacques Roubaud, Elaine Scarry, Beckett, Sir Thomas Browne, etc.