EYEWEAR BRIEF REVIEW: DENISE RILEY'S LATEST IS A MASTERWORK

RILEY LOOKS SQUARELY AT DEATH, LANGUAGE, LOSS, AND SORROW AND RISES TO THE OCCASION

Denise Riley's new collection, Say Something Back, from Picador, is not just a good book of poetry. It is, in a very quiet way, truly great.

Line after line, phrase after phrase, pivot and lift with a certain extra sense of all the ambiguities, ironies, and possibilities, not just of deploying those particular words in that order, but of saying anything, at all - and deeper, of even the possibility of constructing any kind of sensibility at all; especially when the tongue and the poet come up against death's impasse.

Or is it one? If language has any chance of outlasting what ends us, Riley's new poems, believe it or not, with terrible solemnity, much learning and bravado, and not a little black-comedy, offer options for what kind of poetic ectoplasm might gather and remain. If at all.

They say the brain is plastic and grows smarter in the presence of intelligence. Every poet, every writer, who wants to grow into using words, and feeling words, and feeling being itself, could grow from reading this modestly encompassing masterwork.

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IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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