Denise Riley's Selected Poems (Reality Street, 2000), second selection

More favourite passages from a splendid book:



One afternoon hour burns away until a rust-
coloured light sinks in towards evening

or any time at all when I fall straight through
myself to thud as onto the streaked floor of

a swimming pool drained out for winter, no
greeny depths but lined in blackened leaves. 

*

The wind sheets slap the sea to ruffled wheatfields.
Angel, fish, paradise, rain of cherries.

from "Knowing in the Real World"

It will come sobbing in my ears

calling my names to me over and over.

I'll think, and try to keep my eyes

wide open as if swimming underwater.

from "What Else"

The violet 

light of snow falling.

*

It's restless, it can't 

find whiteness.

Its grey and violet

trillion souls.

from "Poor Snow"

I haven't got a body, till it hurts--

from "Pastoral"

...it will keep your beautiful soul glazed as a 

skein of floating hill mist and as quietly as slightly

and as palely lit--

from "Well All Right"

                                --what you need you shall not get until

once you no longer need it then you will, will fall through

jampacked rivers red with thickset fish, through thrashing

muscled rivers' noisy dash pulsing from mud depths up to

air-drenched jumping surfaces in brilliant scales of scarlet

time.

*

Wait, lean from the topmost window, see over all this city

in its gravely vigorous life the moon hung orange in the 

humming sky, the deeply breathing the electric air, tall

houses dropping glow, one fox-pure shriek, dark gardens'

charcoal pools, faint droning far-off traffic, never sleep

high twists of sirens spiral down the road and palest heads

of swimming roses gape awash in their own light against

the grind of buses starting out as in this night a single

traveller flies home through everything inside one life, its

fearful hesitations, pouncing leaps of speed; at daybreak

an hour's whiteness comes to lie in folds not brushed by

any shadow screens, I act as a fan, I find soul settlement

from "A Drift"

No I don't much like this bland authoritative tone either

but it is what I took from years of reworded loss.

So if my skin slid downwards to the ground

you would see only a standing pillar of blood.

Believe that this would be true also of you.

from "Cruelty without Beauty"

...next become mildly malicious in studying the failed consolations of middle age

that at least some of the people you once mistakenly went to bed with and v.v.

now sometimes look seedier, more despairing than you, though that's only

because you get to use lipstick and hair-dye whereas they on the whole do not--

your vanities, and pleasure in theatrical self-blame, have got you where you are today

that's here: and though you've noticed now that you can breathe again, you do

*

with how to hook on to the sliding skin of the world in time

or: in time I am going to die, can you be there

*

an engine of light forgets about everything

but roaring you into it

*

Not your happy here-we-go-down-together dream of a roseate catastrophe

Not your reassuring conviction that whole governments

Will pale and stagger under the jawbones of your dismembered syntax

Vain boy! it keeps you busy, though you know

That Belgrade and Zagreb still shelter many post-surrealists, as does East Central One.

*

There was such brilliance lifting off the sea, its aquamarine strip 

*

Thickened with books again, vexed by the

grave again, falling downstairs and not looking

and going outside again there's

a world, there's one in here also

from "Seven Strangely Exciting Lies"

Purchase Selected Poems directly from the publisher for a mere £9 here.