In a world where poets argue endlessly over what makes the ideal poem, Denise Riley’s verse stands out immediately as curiously, and deliciously, non-partisan. Yet at first reading it’s hard to work out why. Gradually you realise this is because her strengths are so varied: notice one quality you admire, and another follows hard behind.
Riley is an enormously gifted writer. Do you want lightning intelligence? Say Something Back, her latest, Forward prize-shortlisted collection, leaps from allusion to allusion, from La Rochefoucauld to WB Yeats, from the films of Antonioni to Piero della Francesca. Do you enjoy the colour that travel brings to the cheek? Here are “Touristic in Kyoto”, and “Krasnoye Selo”, in which the St Petersburg origins of the first world war are transformed into a timeless personal mood-picture. Perhaps you relish formal richness? In this collection, quatrains in full rhyme and a homage to William Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed on Westminster Bridge” in perfect pentameter sonnet form rub shoulders with prose poems. A courtly Renaissance diction meets informal turns of phrase that are like sudden illuminations of the highly personal nature of the writing.
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