Lavinia Greenlaw

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.

Two Poems

Lavinia Greenlaw, 25 October 2018

My father leaving

I have found a form for my grief in the memory of a young deer I glimpsed by the side of the road half destroyed half poised to make a leap.

The snow held in place its shock at being collapsed back into the earth while yet to know what it was here for or what needed to be done.

Did you think the earth had taken hold the day you pulled off the road and walked away from...

Spurious, Glorious: Three Long Poems

Lavinia Greenlaw, 13 September 2018

The long poem​ pre-empts its own significance. We expect more of it and less of ourselves, adjusting our pace and investing in the big picture. Hannah Sullivan’s majestic debut offers three big pictures – birth, coming of age and death – but this isn’t a triptych. Instead, these themes extend across the book, with the poems acting as a set of transparencies that...

Four Poems

Lavinia Greenlaw, 8 March 2018

There, he says

His wife has died, he is alone and so we follow him into the storm because he wants to take us out. Out where?There, he says as we turn each black corner, there.

A man in grief walking the empty centre of a Sunday-night small town caught up in the act of knowing where he’s going as we repeat the drenched streets.

He’s already got us running in circles as if we...

Indoor Raincoat: Joy Division

Lavinia Greenlaw, 23 April 2015

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.

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...

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Send no postcards, take no pictures

John Redmond, 21 May 1998

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,...

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Ever so comfy

James Wood, 24 March 1994

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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