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The Casual Perfect

Lavinia Greenlaw

The Casual Perfect by Lavinia Greenlaw is the striking new collection from the award-winning poet.

Format
Hardback
ISBN
9780571278169
Date Published
01.09.2011
Delivery
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Summary

If 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.

LaviniaGreenlaw

Lavinia Greenlaw was born in London. She studied seventeenth-century art at the Courtauld Institute, and was the first artist in residence at the Science Museum. Her awards include a NESTA fellowship, the Ted Hughes Award for her immersive soundwork, Audio Obscura, and a Wellcome Engagement Fellowship. She has published six collections of poetry with Faber, including Minsk (2003), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot, Forward and…

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