Customer Reviews

The Poems of Laura Riding: A Newly Revised Edition of the 1938/1980 Collection, Revised Edition

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I'll start by admitting that I just couldn't read the whole thing. I read the first 40 pages of poems after starting with all the wonderful introductory material and just didn't find enough in them to keep going. I flipped through the book to read poems from different parts of the book and just kept being disappointed. There are a lot of positive reviews for this book out there, one which even compares Riding to Gluck, who might be my favorite poet. So I could be missing something. And there are some great moments. There is absolute beauty every now and then. But just not enough to keep me going for 400 pages. A "selected works" might be better. For myself, I'll stick to reading her essays.

The essays (intros, prefaces, whatever) that begin the book are brilliant. Laura Riding has a lot of very intelligent things to say about how we use language and how language is the realm in which we most closely approach truth, or at least in language we are able to complete truth.

However, keeping in mind that Riding eventually renounced poetry in order to dedicate herself more exclusively to linguistic studies, the poems seem to live in the abstract. There is a lot to be said for Riding's use of language and her ability to use diction and syntax to express things that are either incredibly specific, or remain so unattainably open that the mind must open with them and follow the poem a million directions at once. But more often than not, the poems feel like an exercise in language and nothing more. It feels like she's always playing. And her concentration specifically on language means that she is always dealing in the abstract. Her poems tend to lack structure and imagery.

I think I see the reason that Ms. Riding is remembered primarily for her essays and her work in linguistics.