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Writing in the introduction to his Fifty Poems in 1988, Ian Hamilton commented on his younger self, ‘But did I truly think that poetry, if perfect, could bring back the dead? In some ways yes, I think I did’ Hamilton was at the extremist end of ‘faith’ in the lyric’s potential, a belief that poetic language might reach beyond ordinary dialogue: ‘While writing a poem, one could have the illusion that one was talking in a magic way to the subject of the poem One might even think that this is doing some good, making things better’ The ‘you’ in Hamilton’s poems was confined to a few, imagistic details, in terse addresses which owed a debt to Thomas Hardy’s poems of 1912 and 1913, written by Hardy in the throes of guilt which followed his wife Emma’s death A poetic version of esprit de l’escalier; all the tenderness and devotion he hadn’t shown during their marriage was expressed too late, addressed to Emma’s wished-for ghost as if she were capable of listening As with Hamilton, any comfort provided was, ultimately, only for the poet, but the instinct to speak to the dead in the hope of getting through casts the poem into a secular equivalent of the Eucharist, aiming to summon a real presence through linguistic ritual Denise Riley’s extraordinary elegy for her son, ‘A Part Song’, demonstrates some of this magical thinking Riley writes ‘It’s all a resurrection song/Would it ever be got right/The dead could rush home/Keen to press their chinos’ That ‘belief’ which Hamilton once clung to, that the platonic poem might bring back the dead, has some ‘truth’ to it, at least on a semantic level Riley speaks to her unanswering ‘you’ in the present tense: ‘Outgoing soul, I try to catch/You calling over the distances/Though your voice is echoey’ At least for the duration of the poem the ‘you’ is summoned, and while they can’t reply there is a charge to it; they are implicit and implicated, albeit ‘It’s not like hearing you live was’   Aspects of Riley’s work seem to have informed Emily Berry’s