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“... Please supply a biographical note’A natal error.Steadied by pamphletsand brilliance of the babies.In leaping joy alone.Why do some will themselves to stone.Now is it time for night to fall.And home lamenting bore itHose down the bloody lamb.Shear its woolly skin to the bone.Penitential rain, cleanse my remembering.Mop me in blue scrubs.Mother of mercy, when we were thin!Be quickI’ve no companionbar a shadowpointing backwards ...”

“... Still looking for lost people – look unrelentingly. ‘They died’ is not an utterance in the syntax of life Where they belonged, no belong – reanimate them Not minding if the still living turn away, casually. Winds ruck up its skin so the sea tilts from red-blue To blue-red: into the puckering water go his ashes Who was steadier than these elements ...”

“... Happiness, I consider in my papery season, did zigzag toward me until later I got hated, in the guise of that demon I was held to be. Now I forget much, in my white fog pierced by rare if brilliant rays. My beard careens into spidery threads, long and light on the wind. Let these scant years keep lucid, unclouded by the familiar sorrows, and released from their rattle of verdicts, whether issued or received ...”

“... In this podcast Denise Riley reads ‘A Part Song’. The full text is available for subscribers. i You principle of song, what are you for now Perking up under any spasmodic light To trot out your shadowed warblings? Mince, slight pillar. And sleek down Your furriness. Slim as a whippy wire Shall be your hope, and ultraflexible ...”

“... The literary strength of this country rests in the safe keeping of its advertising copywriters, a species properly deserving respect. In recent years a gin manufacturer ran a series of cinema commercials. The screen, shaded bottle-green to evoke the green-bottled gin, would be captioned something like ‘frogs leaping on a baize table on a grassy field ...”

“... of language, examining the dubiousness of words, but also a poet, keeping faith with a vocation? Denise Riley argues with her identities and ‘identity’ in general: she is unhappy with them, casts them off only to find them stuck on again in the morning. She is also our pre-eminent dialectician of vulnerability and scepticism, the first addressed in ...”

“... best of them began to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only have been worth ...”

“... cats. She also saw herself, or found herself, in essays by Nuar Alsadir, Carolee Schneemann and Denise Riley, in a novel by Jean Rhys and a poem by Selima Hill. ‘I began to … believe,’ she wrote, ‘that [Hill’s poem] was speaking to me personally.’ Collins’s ‘earnest desire to consider’ these works ‘on their own terms’ sat uneasily ...”

“... is a kind of thwarted ringing’, as she writes in The Magnitude of My Sublime Existence (2016). Denise Riley, in her essay ‘Lyric Shame’, proposes that ‘literary writing may function, for some, exactly as a means of not speaking.’ The writing of poems, in this sense, does not contradict but complements silence. In ‘The Beautiful Man Whose ...”

“... of love and its realities. ‘To be in fantasy is to live “as if”,’ according to Denise Riley, but life may become intolerable when a metaphor collides with the facts.So love has a history. Does knowing that make it survivable? ‘In my view,’ Barbara Rosenwein writes, ‘knowing love’s history may also be – is – a kind of ...”

“... Adcock, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Elaine Feinstein are all variously represented, opening out the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties as a time of diversity and imaginative enterprise. One poet who appears in ...”

“... does offer immediate access to the past, at least to the individual’s portion of it. But, as Denise Riley recognises, in the last and most powerful contribution to the volume, the womb of memory gives birth, not to time past itself, but to stories of time past; such stories may have their own force, but it is not the force of how it was or what ...”

“... always relative to other categories which themselves change.’ Thus the British poet-philosopher Denise Riley in Am I That Name? (1988), her short, playful, brilliant study of the many ways in which fixed identities never work. ‘That “women” is indeterminate and impossible … is what makes feminism,’ ...”

“... a succès d’estime, quasi-academic projects with spin (such as the provocative series edited by Denise Riley for Macmillan). Poets who preferred to compose by assemblage, by having the ‘right’ books on their shelves, began to deal in the better class of used literature: with the attendant strangeness of honourable leftists peddling Wyndham Lewis ...”

“... that will destroy the subjectivity he revokes. A recent essay on ‘Bad Words’ by the poet Denise Riley clarifies all this. ‘There’s nothing gratifyingly original,’ she notes, ‘about the language of attack, in which old speech plays through the accuser.’ Hate speech is so formulaic and repetitive that its user is more likely to be ...”