Selected Poems

This is the author's own selection from a thirty-year body of work that has distinguished Lavinia Greenlaw as one of our most perceptive and original poets.

It celebrates a lifetime's investigation into how we see, and don't see, and how we locate ourselves in place and time and with each other.

From her arresting debut, Night Photograph (1993) through five further collections, it documents a poet moving through life from young love and early parenthood to the years of uncertainty, reflection, strength and loss, while continuing to pursue the questions that drive her forensic curiosity.

The book comes to rest on The Built Moment (2019) with its simple heartbreaking observation of her father's dementia and his disappearance into the present tense countered by poems that remind us that there is always something left from which to build. '. the sensuous 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