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 Kingdom

Part 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 postscript 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.

Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.