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.
The snow is blameless. It falls like someone who cannot stop talking, in querulous drifts. It covers the same ground we barely remember, collects evidence wherever we slip.
Thaw turns to ice, freezing the surface to a single assertion. We must break glass with every step to reach a starting point.And the children. What of the children?
AcquisitionsHenry Ford boasted there would be...
For Don Paterson
He preferred his glass eye to be of itself, vitreous not ocular or even optically convincing.
Without pupil or iris, allowed to risk its stubbornly fluid nature, the blue held everything.
It liquefied in candlelight and clouded over in winter. Once, at the opera, an aria
built wave upon wave of sound, higher and closer till it struck the resonant frequency
of blue glass and...
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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