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foggy_rosamund's review against another edition
5.0
Sometimes, when I'm really bowled over by a collection, it's hard for me to comment on it. I've heard Denise Riley's work described as "too intellectual", which, for me, is a label like "too feminist", i.e. an incitement to read it, not a disincentive. But it does take a little while to get to grips with Riley's voice: while her work is emotional, it's also considered, and she uses several layers of meaning and language in each of her poems. It's worth taking time with her work, and Riley invites you to follow her through her thoughts and references: she doesn't willfully confuse, but leads her reader to a deeper plane of meaning. She's also inventive, playful with language and form, and her work is lush with imagery. This collection is full of haunting grief for a dead child. It describes how the anger and intensity of grief is hard to witness or understand from the outside, and captures the extreme aloneness of being. But despite its darkness, I also found solace in this work, a sense of being witnessed and of witnessing. Paradoxically, we are both never alone and always alone: someone else has always experienced what we have experienced, and yet there are barriers around each individual that can never be breached. Riley finds the hope in this as well as the sadness.
There are many poems worth quoting (all of them, possibly), but part 11 of her long poem "A Part Song" inspired me to really focus on this collection:
Ardent bee, still you go blundering
With downy saddlebags stuffed tight
All over the fuchsia's drop earrings.
I'll cry 'Oh bee!' to you, instead -
Since my own dead, apostrophised,
Keep mute as this clear garnet glaze
You're bumping into. Blind diligence,
Bee, or idiocy - this banging on and on
Against such shiny crimson unresponse.
There are many poems worth quoting (all of them, possibly), but part 11 of her long poem "A Part Song" inspired me to really focus on this collection:
Ardent bee, still you go blundering
With downy saddlebags stuffed tight
All over the fuchsia's drop earrings.
I'll cry 'Oh bee!' to you, instead -
Since my own dead, apostrophised,
Keep mute as this clear garnet glaze
You're bumping into. Blind diligence,
Bee, or idiocy - this banging on and on
Against such shiny crimson unresponse.
zoey69's review against another edition
2.0
migraine aura/ after-image vs weird contemporary poetry spacing: unstoppable force meets immovable object
lifeinpoetry's review
5.0
Excerpts:
I slept. In my sleep, I wept as I
dreamt you were still good to me.
I awoke in unrelenting tears.
(from “Following Heine”)
“Move on,” you hear, but to what howling emptiness?
(from “Little Eva”)
I try to find you, yet you are not here. / I’ve studied absence, fought to fill it in—
(from “Hiding in plain sight”)
There was and there is a life, I swim in it, but I wouldn’t say that it’s exactly “mine.”
(from “Pythian”)
I slept. In my sleep, I wept as I
dreamt you were still good to me.
I awoke in unrelenting tears.
(from “Following Heine”)
“Move on,” you hear, but to what howling emptiness?
(from “Little Eva”)
I try to find you, yet you are not here. / I’ve studied absence, fought to fill it in—
(from “Hiding in plain sight”)
There was and there is a life, I swim in it, but I wouldn’t say that it’s exactly “mine.”
(from “Pythian”)