Lavinia Greenlaw

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...

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...

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...