From her arresting debut, Night Photograph (1993), through five further collections, the poems reflect a lifelong preoccupation with perception: how we describe what we see or envisage what we can’t see, and how we locate ourselves in place and time and in relation to one another. The selection also documents a poet moving through life from young love and early parenthood to the years of uncertainty, endurance, reflection and loss. The book comes to rest on The Built Moment (2019) with its heart-breaking sequence about her father’s dementia and what it means to disappear into the present tense. Yet even here we are shown that among the broken and the fragmented, the provisional and the changeable, there is always something left from which to build.

The poems have been chosen by the author herself and are accompanied by an illuminating series of notes: observations and provocations aimed at encouraging writers and readers towards a deeper understanding of the nature and practice of poetry.

‘. . . the sensuousness of her thought and her ability to move between the abstract and the precisely observed remain as potent as ever.’ William Wotton, Guardian

‘. . . a poet who is pushing for a style that is taut, elliptical and which is uncompromising in its desire to forge a voice that is curious and open to change, however disorienting, painful and delightful such transitions might be.’ Deryn Rees-Jones, Independent

‘Everything Greenlaw touches glitters and resonates, her discipline and skill allowing her to be serious, soulful, knockabout, funny and downright strange in the course of a few lines.’ Glyn Maxwell, Vogue

An expansive, wonder-filled collection exploring art, science and travel

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 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, from the Arctic at midwinter to a shingle spit in Norfolk at midsummer, Lavinia Greenlaw invites us to travel such questions as how we might describe what we have never seen before or what helps us to see more clearly or persuades us to see what’s not there. Art, science, technology, vision and memory inform one another in this original and illuminating work.

‘[Greenlaw] wields her erudition lightly.’ Sunday Times

Part memoir, part manifesto, Some Answers Without Questions is an elegant, important and spirited work of self-investigation; the result of decades of answering questions that don’t really matter-and not being asked the ones that do.

‘A delight: approachable, rigorous and omnivorous in its frame of reference. . . a timely, lyrical investigation into what it means to create.’ Observer

The first section, ‘The Sea is an Edge and an Ending’, is a sequence of poems about her father’s dementia and his disappearance into the present tense. It is not a narrative of illness so much as a meditation on the metaphysics of memory and loss. What does it mean to exist only in the present, for your sense of self to come loose and for the past to float free? The second section, ‘The Bluebell Horizontal’, looks towards possibility, and proposes new frameworks in the face of loss. It includes a prayer, a blessing and a speculation on why we cling on to pain. There are structures that arrest remembering and forgetting, and the fundamental arrest of a poet’s difficulty with words.

The Built Moment masterfully demonstrates how, as we get older and death becomes more a part of life, what we build and what we break out of become more important than ever.

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.