Lavinia Greenlaw’s new book of poems is out now from Faber.

@audioobscura

@laviniagreenlaw

19^th-20^th November 2011

Buy on Amazon

Buy on Amazon

“….and one brilliant melange – the poet Lavinia Greenlaw annotating a selection from William Morris’s tour of Iceland. This is formally the most adventurous, with Morris’s text on the recto page, and Greenlaw’s poetic reshapings and interpolations on the verso. It makes the reader dance a kind of duet over the pages, watching how Greenlaw has adapted and inverted the already fascinating account of the Pre-Raphaelite painter’s rather charmingly bumbling trip.”
 Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman/p>

“That Lavinia Greenlaw has chosen to tell the story of her life through the moments musicaux that meant the most to her is excellent news…Greenlaw’s prose is so beautiful, careful and quotable that she hardly needs to insert the words of other great minds, yet we have everyone from Musil to Roth to Homer and Hogarth contributing their thoughts on the great heritage of musical feeling that has been passed down to us. This is not just a book about that heritage, or about the author’s life, but perhaps the loveliest hymn to St Cecilia that this century has yet produced.”
Melissa Katsoulis, Sunday Telegraph

“Whether then, now or in the future, each generation has and will have an (often chaotic) set list of their own making, tunes that define a moment, sounds that last a lifetime. In this tender memoir, Lavinia Greenlaw builds on that assertion, creating a body of work that plays out as sweetly as any finely tuned mixed tape. Honest, melancholy and at times totally random, Greenlaw’s musical musings, from the playground chants of her formative years to the Donny Osmond obsession of her teens, provide a touching canvas from a pre-digital age. From the growing pains of early childhood through to her self-reflective teens, Greenlaw’s sharp observations on the various rites of passage, seen through the sounds she hears and the musical influences she is privy to, are richly imagined yet instantly recognisable.”

Anna Millar, Scotland on Sunday

“A funny, moving and wholly involving account of people struggling belatedly to grow up and take charge of their lives.”
Peter Parker, TLS

“Greenlaw has already established herself has a significant force in British poetry. This novel seems certain to confirm her developing reputation as a writer of lively, intelligent and well-crafted fiction. “
The Guardian

“A piece of ice in the eye, chilling and disturbing, a beautiful portrait of ordinary unhappiness at its best.”
Irish Times

“There is a deep sense of imminent reckoning pervading this subtle and intriguing novel; an unspoken understanding that the irresponsibility – personal and political – must come to an end.”
Observer

“It is hard not to compare this novel with The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen’s novel about family life at the end of the twentieth century … sensuous and richly descriptive.”
Literary Review

“Greenlaw manages both to show the unimportance of human feeling in this setting and to make its intensity present.
Her studies of colour, light, water, ice and distance are fascinating…”
Sean O’Brien, Sunday Times

“ … the bleakness in her memories and seascapes comes across less as an eccentric extreme than as the way the world really moves, or rather the way it does not move, blue and static in its shining ice.”
Stephen Burt, TLS

“ … the sensuous of her thought and her ability to move between the abstract and the precisely observed remain as potent as ever.”
William Wotton, The Guardian

Merrell 2003