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.
When people equate pop lyrics with poetry, they expect pop to feel flattered and sometimes it is. So This Is Permanence reminds us that lyrics can reward close attention without being recast. The book collects the words of Ian Curtis, the singer in Joy Division, who committed suicide in 1980 at the age of 23. Joy Division belonged to the scene that emerged into the space left behind by...
When Tracey Thorn was 17, she bought an electric guitar through a small ad in Melody Maker. Only when she got it home did she realise something was missing: she needed an amp. She played the guitar anyway and got ‘into the habit of making very little noise’. A couple of years later, with Ben Watt, she formed the band Everything But the Girl. In the last thirty years they’ve been ‘signed, dropped, re-signed, mixed and remixed’ while selling around nine million records.Thorn grew up in the suburbs twenty miles north of London.
He walks his mind as a forest and sends of himself into dark places to which he cannot tell the way. The hunt comes on and he in his nerves streams ahead – hounds flung after a scent so violent no matter the path or what’s let fall. A burst of clearing. Water beads and feathers her presence as she thickens and curves. He says words to himself...
Out of the impenetrable wood
Elizabeth Bishop
And young girls shall gather to dance on the highways under petals of light that float from their shoulders and dip into lotioned shadows. They shall coil their salty hair and tug at their lapsed muslins as they fall like cushions, and spill. Do they dance for those creatures whose unmade selves come unbuttoning out of the dark?...
Pulled from my shell of dreams and noise, I was taken to live in a quiet place where the undiluted dark of the streets without streetlight, had no emphasis.
Boys on boys’ shoulders turned the crossroads signpost back, conferred on baffled drivers, four blind corners, an added hour of English winter.
Power cuts shut the short days down. I moved my bed against the boards that hid the...
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...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.