Additional Book Information
Series: NYRB Poets
ISBN: 9781681373997
Pages: 136
Publication Date: February 11, 2020
Say Something Back & Time Lived, Without Its Flow
by Denise Riley, with an afterword by Max Porter
The British poet Denise Riley is one of the finest and most individual writers at work in English today. With her striking musical gifts, she is as happy in traditional forms as experimental, and though her poetry has a kinship to that of the New York School, at heart she is unaligned with any tribe. A distinguished philosopher and feminist theorist as well as a poet, Riley has produced a body of work that is both intellectually uncompromising and emotionally open. This book, her first collection of poems to appear with an American press, includes Riley’s widely acclaimed recent volume Say Something Back, a lyric meditation on bereavement composed, as she has written, “in imagined solidarity with the endless others whose adult children have died, often in far worse circumstances.” Riley’s new prose work, Time Lived, Without Its Flow, returns to the subject of grief, just as grief returns in memory to be continually relived.
Praise
[Riley’s] writing is perfectly weighted, justifies its existence. It is impossible not to want to "say something back" to each of her poems in recognition of their outstanding quality. Her voice is strong and beautiful—an imperative in itself. But her subject is not strength—it is more that she is robust about frailty.
—Kate Kellaway, The Observer
But if, most resonantly of all, you come to poetry to be moved, "A Part Song", the 20-part exequy for the poet’s late son at the heart of [Say Something Back], is an astonishing, wrenching and sustained study of grief. This multifaceted piece is both a poem and a sequence, since each part stands alone but the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Like all major poetry of grief, it invites us to observe the act of witness, the process of trying to present an account.
—Fiona Sampson, The Guardian
This book is without a scrap of sentimentality but provokes a deep emotional response: not from poignancy but in awe at the precision with which Riley records her grief. It is often too painful to read, but too valuable not to.
—John Self, The Guardian