Some Answers Without Questions - 2021
The place I went to when I could not speak was also where my voice came from.
Part memoir, part manifesto, Some Answers Without Questions is a rigorous and lyrical work of self-investigation. Lavinia Greenlaw sets out to explore the impulse to say something, to write or sing, and finds herself confronting matters of presence and absence, anger and speechlessness, authority and permission. The result is important and timely, a spirited and vital exploration of what enables anyone - but a woman and an artist in particular – to speak even when not invited to do so. The title arose from decades of answering questions that don’t really matter and not being asked the ones that do.
The Built Moment - 2019
Guardian review
My last collection, The Casual Perfect, focused on ‘the achievement of the provisional’. In the near decade since writing those poems, I have found myself exploring what we build out of the provisional: beginnings and endings, arrivals and departures, and the moments we fix as memories, fixing too their joy and pain. There are also reflections on thought, language and image as other kinds of framework or fixative.
The Built Moment is divided into two sections. The first, The Sea is an Edge and an Ending, is a sequence of poems about my father’s disappearance into Alzheimer’s. It is not a narrative of illness so much as a meditation on the metaphysics of memory loss. What does it mean only to exist in the present, for your sense of self to come loose and for the past to float free?
These poems were the basis for a short film I made in 2016, also called The Sea is an Edge and an Ending, which continues to be shown in galleries and at festivals. The film carries echoes of Shakespeare’s Tempest in its study of a man under a kind of spell, whose child must observe his strange and terrifying liberation. It moves from the shifting coastal landscape of the east of England, a geography central to my life and work, to eroded interiors containing only the bare structures and reduced emblems of this man’s life.
If the first section of the book is about loss, this section is about possibility. It includes a prayer (‘Men I Have Heard in the Night’), a blessing (‘Fleur de Sel’) and a speculation on why we cling on to pain (‘The Break’). There are poems about Joy Division and David Bowie, and an elegy for my first love. There are structures that arrest remembering and forgetting, and the fundamental arrest of a poet’s difficulty with words. These poems are about what we make and hold onto and offer one another. They are also about how as we get older and death becomes more and more a part of life, what we build and what we break out of becomes more important than ever.
In the City of Love’s Sleep - 2018
‘Raif spoke to Iris for a matter of minutes. What does he see in her? What he needs to. He sleeps and wakes and what comes to mind is a woman turning away. He follows her.’
Iris, a museum conservator in her late forties, is separating from her husband while trying to bring up two daughters in a house that’s falling down. Raif is a stalled academic – as uncertain of the past as he is of the future – whose girlfriend is about to move in. They meet by chance, nothing important is said, yet Iris turns away and starts to run. She is running from what this encounter has woken in her.
In the City of Love’s Sleep is a contemporary fable about what it means to fall in love in middle age. It charts the steps two people take towards each other, and what it means to have taken those steps before. The city becomes a map of confinements and evasions, enticements and release; the museum objects that Iris and Raif come into contact with punctuate the narrative and reflect ways of navigating their emotional terrain.
This mesmerising novel explores our desire to grasp, understand, invest and describe: love and the objects are, in a sense, metaphors for one another. Love is revealed in all its inscrutable complexity: the raw nature of feeling and its uncontrollable, unsettling truths.
A Double Sorrow - 2014
When Chaucer composed Troilus and Criseyde, he gave us what is said to be his finest poem and one of the most captivating love stories ever written. It is also a tale that has been passed from one writer to another over centuries, evolving and enduring as a tragedy of human nature that speaks to us all.
Lavinia Greenlaw’s pinpoint retelling is neither a translation nor a version but something new. She has drawn out the story’s psychological drama through a process of detonation or amplification of image and phrase into original poems. In this series of skilfully crafted seven-line vignettes, she creates a zoetrope that illuminates each small but irrevocable step as these characters argue each other and themselves into and out of love. The result is a breathtaking and shattering read, contemporary and timeless.
The Casual Perfect - 2011
If Lavinia Greenlaw’s Minsk was about home, her new collection tests the proximities of elsewhere, ‘the circle round our house’, the road between two lives. Its title recalls a phrase of Robert Lowell’s to describe Elizabeth Bishop — one of the book’s presiding spirits, with her insistence on the provisional, on the moment in which perception is formed, on landscape as action rather than description. The Casual Perfect continues Lavinia Greenlaw’s explorations of light and the borders of vision, which include a journey to the four corners of Britain to observe the solstices and equinoxes, and a cycle about the East Anglian landscape which is nine-tenths sky.
Questions of travel hover around many of these poems, or questions which need to be ‘travelled fully’ rather than answered — and which involve the overheard and the glimpsed, what is gleaned from traces and external signs. The result is a collection that is under-stated, spare but inclusive, which invites our presence as readers.
Questions of Travel - 2011
Morris’s intimate journals, written for a friend, unconsciously explore questions of travel, noting his reaction to the idea of leaving or arriving, to hurry and delay, what it means to dread a place you’ve never been to or to encounter the actuality of a long-held vision. Poet Lavinia Greenlaw draws out these questions as she follows in the footprints of Morris’s prose, responding to its surfaces and undercurrents, extending its horizons. The result is a new and composite work, which brilliantly explores our conflicted reasons for not staying at home.
The Importance of Music to Girls - 2007
The Quietus Top Forty Books About Music
’If I had not kissed anyone, or danced with anyone, or had a reason to cry, the music made me feel as if I had gone through all that anyway . . . the music attracted and repelled, organised and disturbed and then let us into the night, clusters of emotion ready to dissolve into sleep.’
In The Importance of Music to Girls, Lavinia Greenlaw tells the story of the adventures that music leads us into: getting drunk, falling in love, dying of boredom, cutting our hair, terrifying our parents, wanting to change the world. This is a vivid memoir unlike any other, recalling the furious passion of being young, female, and coming alive through music.
Thoughts of a Night Sea - 2003
Since 1985 Garry Fabian Miller has worked without camera or film, using the first principles of photography to explore the alchemical action of light and chemicals on paper. His artistic language - like that of other cameraless photographers such as Adam Fuss and Susan Derges - is essentially abstract and his raw material is light itself.
Thoughts of a Night Sea marks a return to the emotional and physical territory of Fabian Miller's celebrated early series 'The Sea Horizon', although unlike those camera-based images the horizon here is not a real one. It is a marriage of sea and sky born in his imagination and conjured in the darkroom: a subtly changing sequence that looks back to the seascapes of J.M.W. Turner and forward to the lightscapes of James Turrell. This powerful and poetic group of pictures has prompted Greenlaw's meditations on Fabian Miller's imaginary world, and their collaboration has given rise to a book that is equally a celebration of Fabian Miller's work and an artwork in itself.
A World Where News Travelled Slowly - 1997
Forward Prize for Best Single Poem
The central theme of Greenlaw’s second collection is the unpredictable act of communication, from the mechanical to the miraculous. Other poems are concerned with attempts at preservation – plundered relics, the stately home, an iron lung.
Night Photograph - 1993
Shortlisted for the Whitbread and Forward Poetry Prizes
Galileo’s wife, a woman dying of radium poisoning, the first dog in space, a strangely obsessed pianist, an early beneficiary of plastic surgery and a Russian boy whose adventures are limited by the immature powers of his inventor, are among the characters featured in this collection of poetry.
Signs and Humours - 2007
'Signs and Humours' brings together 100 poems to show how one of the most basic human concerns - the body - has continued to preoccupy, fascinate and agitate poets.