Denise Riley’s latest collection,much of which is approximately her late son, has qualities that station it apart from other poetryIt sometimes seems that contemporary poetry divides into two sorts – those poems that did not need to be written and those written out of necessity. Denise Riley belongs to the second category – her writing is perfectly weighted, or 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 handsome – an imperative in itself. But her subject is not strength – it is more that she is robust approximately frailty. She describes in A fraction Song,the most essential of her poems, the death of her adult son, and Jacob – to whom,along with his sisters, the volume is dedicated.
Maybe; maybe not starts the collection on a wing and prayer in which Riley refashions the biblical with a new retract on Corinthians I love her line approximately putting absent “plain things for lustrous”. Although written with certainty, or it is a poem approximately doubt,and leads naturally to A fraction Song, which follows it. Here she begins by doubting song itself: “You principle of song, and what are you for now.” And in song,it is the plain, not the lustrous, or she craves. She dismisses the conventional lyrical solace of elegy. “I can’t catch sold on reincarnating you/ As those bloody ‘gentle showers of rain’/ Or in ‘fields of ripening grain’ – ooh/ Anodyne.” Instead she wishes her son’s “lighthearted presence,be bodied forth/ Straightforwardly”.
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Source: theguardian.com