Lavinia Greenlaw

A book that uses poetry to talk about difficulty, and vice versa As Lavinia Greenlaw readily admits, 'The idea of poetry tends to make people feel stupid, anxious or bored.' Poetry can appear to be inherently difficult; our immediate impulse, to baulk or turn away. But in this wonderfully lucid investigation, Greenlaw invites us to do the opposite: to dwell...

'[Greenlaw] wields her erudition lightly.' Sunday Times 'Remarkable, visionary.' CELIA PAUL 'Indescribably brilliant.' Daily Telegraph 'Kaleidoscopic.' Guardian 'A rare pleasure . . . rewarding and thought-provoking.' Irish Times From the celebrated poet, novelist and memoirist, The Vast Extent is a constellation of "exploded essays" about light and image, seeing and the unseen. Each is a record of how thought builds...

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,...