Say Something Back and Time Lived, Without Its Flow

‘She’s one of the best poets around’ – Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate of the United KingdomPart poetry collection, part consolation, Say Something Back and Time Lived, Without Its Flow collects Denise Riley’s moving documents of loss and grief together for the first time.Rocked by the horrific experience of maternal grief, Denise Riley wrote the much-celebrated Say Something Back, in which the poet-philosopher contemplates the natural world and physical law, and considers what it means to invoke those who are absent. These are poems which expand our sense of human speech and what it can mean, of what is drawn forth from us when we address our dead.These lyric poems and elegies are accompanied by the beautiful, unflinching Time Lived, Without Its Flow. Diary entries written after receiving news of her adult son’s death are woven into a life portrait of loss. A ruminative post-script to these diaries follows, in which Riley examines the experience with a philosopher’s precision, mapping through it a literature of consolation.Published in a single volume for the first time, Say Something Back and Time Lived, Without Its Flow offers with remarkable grace and insight kind counsel to all those living in the wake of grief.

Denise Riley is a critically acclaimed writer of both philosophy and poetry. She is currently Professor of the History of Ideas and of Poetry at UEA. Her visiting positions have included A.D. White Professor at Cornell University in the US, Writer in Residence at the Tate Gallery in London, and Visiting Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. She has taught philosophy, art history, poetics, and creative writing. She is the author of Say Something Back and lives in London.