The Casual PerfectIf Lavinia Greenlaw's Minsk was about home, her new collection tests the proximities of elsewhere, 'the circle round our house'. It explores the ‘hidden continuous’ in language, life and the body through an invented tense which celebrates ‘the achievement of the provisional’. Questions are to be travelled fully rather than answered. The title recalls a phrase of Robert Lowell’s describing Elizabeth Bishop –one of the book's presiding spirits, with her insistence on the moment at which perception is formed, and on landscape in action rather than as description. Actaeon, Coleridge and Einstein are also present in poems that explore the tension between thought and impulse, between what we’re capable of and what we want to experience, the ‘dance between movement and space’. 'In Minsk, the sensuousness of her thought and her ability to move between the abstract and the precisely observed remain as potent as ever.' – Guardian |
