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.
My six-year-old mechanic, you are up half the night inventing a pipe made from jars, a skiing carfor flat icy roads and a timer-catapult involving a palm tree, candles and rope.
You could barely stand when I once found you, having loosened the bars from the cot and stepped out so simply you shocked yourself. Today I am tearful, infatuated with bad ideas,
the same song, over and over. You take...
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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