This review is taken from PN Review 140, Volume 27 Number 6, July - August 2001.

on Denise Riley

David Kennedy
John Ennis, Heinrich Heine, Salvador Espriu, Charles Tomlinson, Peter Bland, Carole Satyamurti, Andrew Motion, Michael Longley, David Scott, Michael Longley, John Riley, Mark Strand, Denise Riley, John Montague, Clive Wilmer, Matthew Sweeney, Peter Abbs, George MacBeth, W.S. Graham, Francis Ponge, Douglas Clark, David Gascoyne, Christine Evans, Derek Mahon, Frederick Seidel, Geoff Page, Thomas Kinsella, Michael Hofmann, Ruth Bidgood, Kirkpatrick Dobie, Vicki Raymond, David Malouf, E.J. Scovell, Jean Garrigue, Fleur Adcock, Kenneth Koch, Bernard O'Donoghue, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, James Schuyler, Lee Harwood, David Wright, Vivian Smith, Kathleen Raine, Hugo Williams, David Harsent, Michael Hamburger, Mark O'Connor, Les A. Murray, Charles Johnston, Fleur Adcock, Philip Levine, Galway Kinnell, Michael Riviere, Lawrence Lerner, Thomas Blackburn, D.M. Thomas, Fleur Adcock, John Montague, P.J. Kavanagh, David Holbrook, John Silkin, Günter Grass, Elizabeth Jennings, Patricia Beer, Peter Sansom, Jaan Kaplinski, Vladimir Khodasevich, Jack Clemo, Frank Koenegracht, Jamie McKendrick, Michael Symmons Roberts, Jean Bleakney, William Plomer, Colette Bryce, Kathleen Jamie, Selected Poems (Reality Street) £7.50
Cover of Selected Poems

Denise Riley's Selected Poems opens with 'A note on sex and - the reclaiming of language ' - one of the few pieces preserved from her first volume Marxism For Infants (1977). Its third stanza asserts that,

The work is
e.g. to write 'she' and for that to be a statement
of fact only, and not a strong image
of everything which is not-you, which sees you.

The poem's title locates it with books like Dale Spender's Man Made Language and poetry like Michèle Roberts' 'Women's entry into culture is experienced as lack' but the passage quoted has a double purpose. It establishes the formative context of Riley's poetry as the decade when the liberationist aesthetics of the 1960s were being rigorously re-articulated as theory but it simultaneously articulates dissent with aspects of its own apparent origin.

The double articulation means that placing 'A note on sex ...' at the beginning of a Selected Poems previews important aspects of Riley's poetry. The passage quoted is selfconsciously musical and rhythmical but undercuts its own pleasures by wanting empirical language. It uses the language of a collective re-articulation of identity while questioning that re-articulation's espousal of essentialism. It looks like a considered statement but when read aloud seems breathless with frustration and impatience.

To read Riley is to be drawn into intense dramas about language and identity in which the expression of authenticity and sincerity constantly founders on ...
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