Synopsis
‘One of the most eloquent thinkers about our life in language’ – The Sunday Times
A Chorus of Ears is a series of essays on voice, lyric and the persona of the poet from one of our greatest living English poets. Denise Riley contemplates how a poet's public persona can hold more significance than their actual poetry in the modern literary world. She reflects on how prize culture can transform criticism into a beauty contest, and limit our ability to meet the lyric on its own terms.
What might be discovered, Riley asks, if we liberate the poem from the person of the author? From where does its own voice spring? In allowing the poem to speak, what might we hear?
Including a foreword by leading poet and critic Don Paterson.
'One of the great poets of our time ' – New Statesman
Details
25 June 2026
9781035095971Reviews
This is a book which sets Riley alongside Virginia Woolf, confirming her as one of the most profound poetic thinkers of our time
Very occasionally, and always at the right time, an Angel of Poetry appears, holding up a light
A much-needed reminder of inspiration’s independence, A Chorus of Ears gently resets the coordinates of contemporary poetry away from the mechanical and literal-minded. My repeated thought on reading it was ‘Oh thank goodness for Denise Riley’
Daring intellectually and sensitively tuned to the interiority of the poem and its making. [A Chorus of Ears] asks us to think again about ‘voice’ in poetry, finding language to articulate the difficult borderland between an inner listening and the already said, the living and the dead
