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.