Staff Pick
This book is worth reading just for its haunting poem 'Part Song,' Riley's long sequence about grieving the sudden death of her son. Paired brilliantly in this edition with her essay 'Time Lived Without Its Flow,' its words feel ever-resonant for our strange, griefstruck times, offering us a vital poetic dialogue (and traveling companion) "under the fretful wave" of unresolvable loss. Recommended By Alexa W., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
A moving meditation on grief and motherhood by one of Britain's most celebrated poets. Say Something Back will allow readers to see just why Denise Riley has been held in such high regard by her fellow poets for so long. The book reproduces A Part Song, a profoundly moving document of grieving and loss, and one of the most widely admired long poems of recent years. Elsewhere these poems become a space for contemplation of the natural world and of physical law, and for considering what it is to invoke those who are absent. But finally, they extend our sense of what the act of human speech can mean--and especially what is drawn forth from us when we address our dead. Lyric, intimate, acidly witty, unflinchingly brave, Say Something Back--which also includes a powerful new prose meditation about grief and its aftermath, "Time Lived, Without Its Flow"--is a deeply moving book by one of our finest poets, and one destined to introduce Riley's name to a wide new readership.
Synopsis
A moving meditation on grief and motherhood by one of Britain's most celebrated poets. 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.