The Casual PerfectIf 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. |
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Answers Without Questions AUDIO OBSCURA BBC Radio breath Britain's Patricia Highsmith Casual Perfect Circle Round coat simple dance dark Drip Torch earth Einstein ELIZABETH BISHOP English Lullaby eyes enamel Flemish Floodmeadow framed FREMLIN gesture hair Hevenyssh House of Flight I’ll find Infinite Proximity instant classic Irish Isla McGuire Joy and Difficulty KIND WORTH Landscape for Isla last of winter LAVINIA GREENLAW LEE CHILD LETTERS of LOUIS light line and ring Lost Letter Louis MacNeice love she loses lover LOW PROSPECT MINSK moon Morris in Iceland MUSIC TO GIRLS night noise OTOLITH pages Buy Poetry pure direction QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL Round Our House rush through empty Scarlet Geranium Science Museum silver skeletons emerge sleep SLOW PASSAGE song speak SUMMER HOLIDAY SUNDAY TIMES TOP T. S. Eliot Traces and External train travelled fully tree or ice Uncle Paul Water for Tea what’s Whiskey and Scarlet William Morris WINTER FINDING