Sometimes
there is a poet who should be read far, far more. Denise Riley used to be one such. I doubt there was any lack of depth of
engagement from those who knew and liked her work – it was more about lack of breadth. I used to enjoy introducing people to her:
generally this would cause interest and excitement.
Introductions
should no longer be necessary, now that her new book Say Something Back is out from Picador and shortlisted for the
Forward Prize. I’ve just reviewed it for
the next issue of The Compass which
will be appearing online shortly, so I won’t write about that book here.
I
expect people will read backwards from Say
Something Back and discover Riley’s Selected Poems (Reality Street, 2000).
My
first encounter with her work was online, in a year or two of intensive reading
after giving up my job. That time was
full of discoveries but finding Riley was one of those where you remember the
feeling years later. I’d never read
anything like her and printed out all the poems I could find**, off an obscure
website which perhaps shouldn’t have reproduced them. ‘Dark Looks’ was the first one I read and I
can still visualise the typewriter typeface it was in. The poem now appears in more accessible
places – see here. It starts:
Who anyone is or I am is nothing to
the work. The writer
properly should be the last person
that the reader or the listener
need think about
yet the poet with her signature
stands up trembling, grateful,
mortally
embarrassed
and especially embarrassing to
herself, patting her hair and
twittering If, if only
I need not have a physical
appearance! To be sheer air, and
mousseline!
A
funny, ironic, cool, hard-hittingly true, pun-filled and vivid monologue with intellect
and emotion working together. Its one
page contains so much – a cogent argument, embarrassment that makes the reader
cringe (that If only! and To be!), Victorian Anglo-Catholicism, film, modern
materials, spiritualism, feminism (with special focus on periods) and more, and
I’m sure some things I’ve missed… back to the horrors of poetry readings:
What forces the lyric person to put
itself on trial though it must stay
rigorously uninteresting?
Quite. ‘Dark Looks’ ends with a plea to the listener/reader
not to run off. As if we would. Riley is generally brilliant at awkwardness
and self-consciousness – she does them like no-one else.
She
describes feelings and situations in ways you’d never expect. An early poem, ‘Affections must not’ (full poem is here), ends:
the houses are murmuring with many
small pockets of emotion
on which spongy ground adults’ lives
are being erected and paid for
daily
while their feet and their children’s’
feet are tangled around like
those of fen larks
in the fine steely wires which run
to and fro between love and
economics
affections must not support the rent
I. neglect. the. house
That
hard, practical yet weird metaphor is typical.
Line breaks are used instead of punctuation for the subordinate clauses and
the words run fast. The full stops in the last line are the only
ones in the poem; they convey (I think) resolution and they stop us dead. ‘Fen
larks’: anyone else would have written just ‘larks’, not that they’d have
written any of this at all.
And
in ‘Rayon’:
The day is nervous buff – the
shakiness, is it inside the day or me?
‘Buff’:
polishing movements, a blow, involuntary splutters of laughter, a certain heavy
animal, a dull pale colour, naked skin…
Riley’s
ekphrastic poems draw emotions out of their subjects: in ‘Lure’ she mixes in
scraps of song lyrics.
Flood, drag to papery
long brushes
of deep violet, that’s where it is,
indigo, oh no, it’s in
his kiss. Lime brilliance. Obsessive
song. Ink tongues.
Density
is a common feature – reading Riley out loud, your mouth works hard at the consonants
but finds resonance and relief in the frequent assonance – see above. Syntax can be complex but is always clear and
carries the reader along. Some poems are
simpler in form and foreshadow the work in Say
Something Back. From ‘Lyric’:
I take on its rage at the cost
of sleep. If I love it I sink
attracting its hatred. If I
don’t love it I steal its music.
See
also ‘An awkward lyric’ in her new book.
Riley
is an academic – literature and philosophy.
I assume that much in the poems has been
deeply considered elsewhere too. According
to its online blurb, her book The Words
of Selves examines the question: What does it matter what you say about
yourself? She says in the introduction: “There
may sometimes be an inherent emotionality to grammar”. She walks the walk of that statement in every
poem.
Today
I’ve been reading Denise Riley alongside Geoffrey Hill. Two great lyrical modernists (if that
description makes sense); both allusive, political, complex on and/or below the
surface; both with large intellectual hinterlands.
You
can get hold of Denise Riley’s Selected
Poems here. It might sell out…
**This
was in the pre-Poetry Archive era; you can read and hear several of her earlier poems there. It’s offline this afternoon
but I think the poems include ‘Dark Looks’ and another favourite, ‘Shantung’. Also, see here for a podcast of her reading ‘A
Part Song’, the much-admired long poem from Say
Something Back. Riley was in volume
10 of the Penguin Modern Poets. She had
books before her Selected, some published
by Virago (see Dry Air in the photo –
I was delighted to find this at the Blackheath Amnesty International book sale). Several years ago I searched for them in the
Poetry Library but they had mostly gone missing.
