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.
Out of the impenetrable wood
Elizabeth Bishop
And young girls shall gather to dance on the highways under petals of light that float from their shoulders and dip into lotioned shadows. They shall coil their salty hair and tug at their lapsed muslins as they fall like cushions, and spill. Do they dance for those creatures whose unmade selves come unbuttoning out of the dark?...
Pulled from my shell of dreams and noise, I was taken to live in a quiet place where the undiluted dark of the streets without streetlight, had no emphasis.
Boys on boys’ shoulders turned the crossroads signpost back, conferred on baffled drivers, four blind corners, an added hour of English winter.
Power cuts shut the short days down. I moved my bed against the boards that hid the...
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...
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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