The Close ChapletLaura Riding The Close Chaplet is Laura Ridings first book, long out of print, originally published in 1926. Riding deliberately ceased writing poems after 1940, when she came to see poetry as irrevocably flawed as a means of expression. These poems demonstrate Ridings early desire to depart from the close and well tilled ground of traditional lyric poetry. In his introduction, Mark Jacobs writes that Riding identifies herself with the pre moment, the