In February 2012, the London Review of Books published a series of 20 poems by Denise Riley. A Part Song, an extended elegy for her son, is an extraordinary work, and one of the most admired long poems of the 21st century. It later went on to win the Forward Prize, and the collection of which it became a part, Say Something Back, was published by Picador in 2016. So began the popular celebration of a poet and philosopher who, though she had published her first collection in the late 1970s, had typically been considered a “poet’s poet”, her works achieving a sort of cult status, often out-of-print, handed between those in-the-know with a sort of reverence.
After being 'thrown outside time' by the death of her son, Riley explores the change of cognition she has experienced
A Part Song is addressed to Riley’s son throughout, but begins with an invocation, a sort of accusation against poetry, in which the “you” is wonderfully ambiguous. “You principle of song, what are you for now.” Language, poetry, and the fundamentals of our perception, are shocked into question by grief, and Riley grapples with the limits of her trade when faced with such a monumental shift of perspective. Her short prose work Time Lived, Without Its Flow was published in the same year as A Part Song, and interrogates similar themes. Now, it is republished in a widely-available edition with a glowing introduction by Max Porter, author of that other striking work on loss, Grief is the Thing with Feathers.
Breathtaking
In her poetry, Riley’s ability to assimilate philosophy, feminism and literary history through a restless lyric exactitude is often breathtaking. This is a mind that is always at work, arguing with itself and with the reader. That might make Riley sound accusatory or difficult; on the contrary, her voice is often spare, honest, even conspiratorial. In Time Lived, Without Its Flow, as the title suggests, Riley’s theme is arrested or flummoxed time. “I will not be writing about death, but an altered condition of life”, she tells us. In the tradition of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Riley’s essay takes as its subject the new reality of the bereaved. Once “so ferociously shaken up”, how does cognition “regroup its forces?” “By what means are we ever to become re-attached to the world?’
The first part of Riley’s essay is written as notes, each headed with a marker of time: “Two weeks after the death”; “Five months after the death”, etc. What we quickly realise is the irony of these markings – time is passing, but it is not passing. As Riley says, “it could be five minutes or half a century”. In the second section of the book, written three years later, Riley uses her keen insight into poetry, philosophy, and loss, to return to her notes, to make sense of them. After being “thrown outside time” by the death of her son, Riley explores the change of cognition she has experienced, the changes in her behaviour, the changes in her understanding of language and, particularly, grammar. Here, she is at her most erudite and insightful: “Perhaps language . . .possesses a belief in spirit.”
In dealing with the bereaved, Riley notes at the very beginning of her essay, “the same phrases recur”:
For instance, many kindly onlookers will instinctively make use of this formula: “I can’t imagine what you are feeling.” There’s a paradox in this remark, for it’s an expression of sympathy, yet in the same breath it’s a disavowal of the possibility of empathy. Undoubtedly it’s very well meant, if (understandably) fear-filled. People’s intentions are good; a respect for the severity of what they suppose you’re enduring, and so a wish not to claim to grasp it. Still, I’d like them to try to imagine; it’s not so difficult. Even if it’s inevitable, or at any rate unsurprising, that those with dead children are regarded with concealed horror, they don’t need to be further shepherded into the inhuman remote realms of the “unimaginable”.
Time Lived, Without Its Flow serves at least a dual function in this respect. For those of us who have experienced a powerful grief, we see ourselves, we hear our thoughts, we find that we are, after all, imaginable, part of a common life. For those of us who are yet to experience it, Riley’s essay offers a remarkable testament and exploration of grief, one which will help us to be kinder, to be more capable and more brave in our imaginings.
