In 2008, the poet and philosopher Denise Riley’s adult son Jacob died suddenly from an undiagnosed heart problem while on holiday. Four years later, she published two new works: a poem about Jacob’s death, “A Part Song”, which won a Forward prize, and the essay “Time Lived, Without Its Flow” in a micro-press edition that was shared reader to reader like a samizdat pamphlet, and is now made widely available in this new edition, introduced by Max Porter.
Riley drops the reader into the thick of life after death. She begins: “I’ll not be writing about death, but an altered condition of life.” This straight-speaking clarity runs throughout, and helps the reader navigate Riley’s complex thinking on what Alice Oswald called “the being of grief and not the feeling of grief”. It is not a memoir: we learn only the barest of details about her son’s death.
A child’s time is 'quietly uncoiling inside your own', so when the child’s life stops, 'the purely cognitive violence of it' freezes the parent’s time, too
Related: Say Something Back by Denise Riley review – exquisite, intimate, direct
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