Lavinia Greenlaw Biography
Lavinia Greenlaw (born 30 July 1962) is an English poet and novelist.
Greenlaw was born in London into a family of doctors and scientists, but in 1973 when she was eleven years old, her family moved from London to a village in Essex. She has described the seven years there as "an interim time", with "memories of time being arrested, nothing much happening." She read modern arts at Kingston Polytechnic, studied at the London College of Printing and has an MA in art history from the Courtauld Institute. She has worked as an editor at Imperial College of Science and Technology and for the publishers Allison and Busby and subsequently Earthscan. She also worked as an arts administrator for the London Arts Board and the South Bank Centre. In 1994 she embarked upon a career as a freelance artist, critic and radio broadcaster. She has been writer in residence at the Science Museum, reader in residence at the Royal Festival Hall, and poet in residence at a firm of solicitors in London.
Her sound work, Audio Obscura, was commissioned in 2011 from Artangel and Manchester International Festival, and won the 2011 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.
She lives in London and currently works as professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia. She was a judge for the 2010 Manchester Poetry Prize.
1980, I was returned to the city exposed
in black and white as the lights went on and on.
A back-alley neon sign, the first I'd seen,
...
It could take from Monday to Thursday
and three horses. The ink was unstable,
the characters cramped, the paper tore where it creased.
Stained with the leather and sweat of its journey,
the envelope absorbed each climatic shift,
as well as the salt and grease of the rider
who handed it over with a four-day chance
that by now things were different and while the head
had to listen, the heart could wait.
Semaphore was invented at a time of revolution;
the judgement of swing in a vertical arm.
News travelled letter by letter, along a chain of towers,
each built within telescopic distance of the next.
The clattering mechanics of the six-shutter telegraph
still took three men with all their variables
added to those of light and weather,
to read, record and pass the message on.
Now words are faster, smaller, harder
...we're almost talking in one another's arms.
Coded and squeezed, what chance has my voice
to reach your voice unaltered and to leave no trace?
Nets tighten across the sky and the sea bed.
When London made contact with New York,
there were such fireworks, City Hall caught light.
It could have burned to the ground.
...
In our game of flight, half-way down
was as near mid-air as it got: a point
of no return we'd fling ourselves at
over and over, riding pillows or trays.
We were quick to smooth the edge
of every step, grinding the carpet to glass
on which we'd lose our grip.
The new stairs were our new toy,
the descent to an odd extension,
four new rooms at flood level
in a sunken garden — a wing
dislocated from a hive. Young bees
with soft stripes and borderless nights,
we'd so far been squared away
in a twin-set of bunkbeds, so tight-knit,
my brother and I once woke up finishing
a conversation begun in a dream.
It had been the simplest exchange,
one I'd give much to return to:
the greetings of shadows unsurprised
at having met beneath the trees
and happy to set off again, alone,
back into the dark.
...
A dance between movement and space,
between image and imperative.
Each step, an arrival
...
Night was and they swayed into it:
a pair of scissors, of sails
turning only into themselves
more other than become.
...
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