Describing the indescribable: how Denise Riley’s “A Part Song” enables readers to encounter her trauma

作者：Linda Collins · 发表于：Journal of Poetry Therapy · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1080/08893675.2024.2409834

ABSTRACT The poetry of trauma can be especially difficult to read if it is written by a mother who has lost a child. Society has expectations of the grieving mother that involve stoicism and silence. Readers may also be apprehensive about the emotional difficulty of reading such harrowing work. Denise Riley's poetry sequence, “A Part Song”, writes away from the authorial self in a combination of lyrical, free verse, and traditional and innovative forms. Using the framework of the “simulation theory” in “How poetry evokes emotions” (Johnson-Laird & Oatley, 2022. Acta Psychologica, 224, 103506. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103506), the author identifies certain prosodic effects in Riley’s work and examines the connections between them, the complex emotions they evoke, and how they enable the reader to safely encounter such profoundly moving subject matter.