Lavinia Greenlaw has published six collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Built Moment, and three novels as well as two volumes of memoir, The Importance of Music to Girls and Some Answers without Questions. She is a professor of creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.
For British music, 1978 was a year of hesitation. Pop began to admit that it didn’t know what to do with itself as punk evolved into New Wave, which was suddenly on Top of the Pops most weeks. Those who had been shocked by punk now just found it annoying. The bands that were still together had learned how to put on a show. They were slicker and more predictable, and we went to see...
A hundred days before I met the strangerwho forced me off the roadand did not leave his name
I dreamt of walking out of a landscapeas if out of a painting –tipped from the picture by its tilting fields.
I was now outside the workwatching the shadow who walked beside meindicate that I should return.
Where to? The tangled woods.Brief figures rose beside the pathin encouragement or...
Where is Osebol? Marit Kapla offers no introduction to this oral history of a Swedish village, just a map showing the southern half of the country and a cluster of places along the Klarälven river, which crosses from Norway. Much of the life of the village – education, work, shopping, fun – occurs in these other places. There are the secondary schools in Stöllet and...
Nico was what is now called ‘extra’ and used to be called ‘too much’. Her relationship with her own presence is what makes her so potent. She’s there and not there. You can’t take your eyes off her, but don’t feel you’ve properly seen her.
For a short while the highest point of the New York skyline was marked by a girl standing on tiptoe. At night she was also the brightest point, the focus of 66 incandescent lamps and ten spotlights, at a time when there was little electric light in the city. During the day, the sun detonated her gilded surface and she ‘flashed against a green-blue sky’, as Willa Cather described...
Lavinia Greenlaw reads from her piece about Tracey Thorn.
It is hard to make a living from poetry. Lavinia Greenlaw has turned her hand to all manner of activities to support her work – publishing, teaching, arts administration, posts as...
Kenneth Koch ends his fine and amusing collection, One Train, with a sequence called ‘On Aesthetics’, which, amongst many other things, takes in the aesthetics of Paul Valéry,...
Every handful of John Updike’s silver has its square coin, its bad penny, its fake. This exquisitely careful writer tends to relax into flamboyance: it is the verbal equivalent of...
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