Lavinia Greenlaw

A warm and engrossing book for any music lover!

The Importance of Music to Girls

importance of music to girls

William Morris in Iceland

Questions of travel

Galileo's wife, a young woman dying of radium poisoning, the first dog in space, a strangely obsessed concert pianist, an early beneficiary of plastic surgery, and a Russian boy whose adventures are sadly limited by the immature powers of the child who has conjured him up are just some of the figures encompassed by Lavinia Greenlaw's imagination.The poet's level gaze as she contemplates the more bizarre aspects of science and of human behaviour lends further distinction to this, her first collection.

Night Photograph

Published in association with the 14-18 NOW campaign and the Imperial War Museum.

Goodbye to All that : Writers on the Conflict Between Life and Art

1914

When Chaucer composed Troilus and Criseyde he gave us, some say, his finest poem, and with it one of the most captivating love stories ever written. A Double Sorrow, Lavinia Greenlaw's new work, takes its title from the opening line of that poem in a fresh telling of this most tortured of love affairs. Set against the Siege of Troy, A Double Sorrow is the story of Trojan hero Troilus and his beloved Criseyde, whose traitorous father has defected to the Greeks and has persuaded them to ask for his daughter in an exchange of prisoners. In an attempt to save her, Troilus suggests that Criseyde flees the besieged city with him, but she knows that she will be universally condemned and looks instead to a temporary measure: pretending to submit to the exchange, while promising Troilus that she will return to him within ten days. But once in the company of the Greeks she soon realises the impossibility of her promise to Troilus, and in despair succumbs to another. Lavinia Greenlaw's pinpoint retelling of this heart-wrenching tale is neither a translation nor strictly a 'version' of Chaucer's work, but instead creates something new: a sequence of glimpses from the medieval poem that refine the psychological drama of the classical story through a process of detonation or amplification of image and phrase into original poems. In a series of skillfully crafted seven-line vignettes, the author creates a zoetrope that serves to illuminate the intensity with which these characters argue each other and themselves into and out of love. The result is a breathtaking and shattering read -contemporary and timeless - that builds into an unforgettable telling of this most heartbreaking of love stories.

Troilus and Criseyde

A Double Sorrow

The place I went to when I could not speak was also where my voice came from.Part memoir, part manifesto, Some Answers Without Questions is a rigorous and lyrical work of self-investigation. Lavinia Greenlaw sets out to explore the impulse to say something, to write or sing, and finds herself confronting matters of presence and absence, anger and speechlessness, authority and permission. The result is important and timely, a spirited and vital exploration of what enables anyone - but a woman and an artist in particular - to create and respond even when not invited to do so. Some Answers Without Questions is the result of decades of answering questions that don't really matter - and not being asked the ones that do.

Some Answers Without Questions

A Version of Troilus and Criseyde

Double Sorrow

From the renowned poet, novelist and memoirist, and ingenious constellation of writings on light, image, seeing . . . and the unseen.

On Seeing And Not Seeing Further

The Vast Extent

For Greenlaw, music--from bubblegum pop to classical piano to the passionate catharsis of punk rock--is at first the key to being a girl and then the means of escape. She has written a razor-sharp remembrance of adolescence, filtered through the art that strikes at the most visceral level.

Built Moment

If Lavinia Greenlaw's Minsk was about home, her new collection tests the proximities of elsewhere, 'the circle round our house', the road between two lives. Its title recalls a phrase of Robert Lowell's to describe Elizabeth Bishop -- one of the book's presiding spirits, with her insistence on the provisional, on the moment in which perception is formed, on landscape as action rather than description. The Casual Perfect continues Lavinia Greenlaw's explorations of light and the borders of vision, which include a journey to the four corners of Britain to observe the solstices and equinoxes, and a cycle about the East Anglian landscape which is nine-tenths sky. Questions of travel hover around many of these poems, or questions which need to be 'travelled fully' rather than answered -- and which involve the overheard and the glimpsed, what is gleaned from traces and external signs. The result is a collection that is under-stated, spare but inclusive, which invites our presence as readers.

The Casual Perfect

Lavinia Greenlaw's first collection, Night Photograph, made an immediately favourable impact. Her second collection, A World Where News Travelled Slowly explores more local and personal matters. Its central theme is the unpredictable act of communication, from the mechanical to the miraculous. There are also poems that are concerned with attempts at preservation - plundered relics, the stately home, an iron lung. This volume serves to confirm the gifts Lavinia Greenlaw showed in her first book.

A World where News Travelled Slowly

A beautiful new edition of Lavinia Greenlaw's mesmerising debut novel about growing up in the surreal banality of mid-'70s Essex.

Mary George of Allnorthover

A POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION Minsk, Lavinia Greenlaw's third collection, was shortlisted for the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection. From London Zoo to an Essex village and the Arctic Circle, Greenlaw explores questions of place - the childhood landscapes we leave behind, those we travel towards, and those like 'Minsk' which we believe to be missing from our lives. Greenlaw's restless, inquisitive tone builds to make Minsk a hypnotic collection from one of the leading poets of her generation.

Minsk

In the City of Love's Sleep

Wie lieben wir? Und wie verändert sich die Liebe im Laufe unseres Lebens? Iris, eine Museumskonservatorin in den mittleren Vierzigern, lernt auf einem Empfang den Historiker Raif kennen. Es scheint Liebe auf den ersten Blick - und mit ihrer Begegnung stellt sich die Frage nach einem glücklichen Leben für beide noch einmal ganz neu. Wann sind wir bereit, ein neues Kapitel aufzuschlagen, und wie viel Intensität, Risiko und Schmerz lassen wir zu, wenn es um unsere Gefühle und Beziehungen geht? Mit erzählerischer Raffinesse entwickelt Lavinia Greenlaw ein komplexes Szenario von Liebe. Ein lebenskluger und ein durch und durch gegenwärtiger Roman.

Lavinia Greenlaw

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