Ange Mlinko talks to Joanne O’Leary about the work of Denise Riley, following the publication last year of Riley’s Selected Poems: 1976-2016 and her essay Time Lived, without Its Flow. They look in particular at Riley’s celebrated poem ‘A Part Song’, a long elegy for her adult son, Jacob, who died from undiagnosed cardiomyopathy in 2008.
‘A Part Song’ was published first in the LRB in 2012 and won the Forward Prize for best poem in that year, and this discussion features extracts of Riley reading from the poem.
This episode of the LRB Podcast is supported by The Week magazine. To try your first 6 issues of The Week for free, visit theweek.co.uk/offer and enter offer code LONDON
