Showing results by narrator "Lavinia Greenlaw" in All Categories

From the celebrated poet, novelist and memoirist, The Vast Extent is an ingenious constellation of "exploded essays" about light and image, seeing and the unseen. Each is a record of how thought builds and ideas emerge, aligning art, myth, strange voyages, scientific scrutiny and a poet's response so that they cast light upon each other. Ranging across caves, seasickness, early photography, boredom, wonder, mountains, mice, the body and its shadow, Lavinia Greenlaw invites us to travel such questions as how we might describe what we have never seen before.

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 record even when not invited to do so.

The Built Moment is divided into two sections. The first, 'The Sea Is an Edge and an Ending', is a sequence of poems about her father's disappearance into Alzheimer's. It is not a narrative of illness so much as a meditation on the metaphysics of memory loss. What does it mean only to exist in the present, for your sense of self to come loose and for the past to float free? The second half of the book is called 'The Bluebell Horizontal'.