Lavinia Greenlaw’s most recent collection of poems is The Built Moment. Her non-fiction includes The Importance of Music to Girls, Some Answers Without Questions, and The Vast Extent: On Seeing and Not Seeing Further. Her immersive sound work, Audio Obscura, won the Ted Hughes Award. She is an Emeritus Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Poetry Editor at Faber.
After Rilke/After Tsvetaeva
Half a life half my life a half-lifewere/are you?
Such immediate/such fittingrecognition
we floated into place. What next/what more?
Absence contrived within and later ofourselves
as invitation/emptiness onlythe other
could unlock/furnish/complete.What we met
in each impossible roomwas love not compensation.
We were already...
In the years of dark listeningto what lay between the seen and the saidI might catch a true thoughtjust as her mind forced it so far downthat it passed through the floor of herselfand into a black chamber.
She walked the surfaceas if such thoughts might rise upto display themselves – out of reach, in view.There are things we say we never knew.They are there far down where we...
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...
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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