Poetry: The Casual Perfect by Lavinia Greenlaw
Varsity’s literary critic Charlotte Keith reviews Greenlaw’s latest publication
Gleaned from a Robert Lowell poem for Elizabeth Bishop – famously meticulous as a writer – in which he calls her “unerring muse who makes the casual perfect”, the title of this collection asserts the sublimity of the offhand.
Greenlaw is interested in the overheard, the incomplete, the moment at which we start to make sense of things: “the needle’s hesitation/the song caught in the breath”. “It’s not the theme that interest me/but the variation”, she announces, with the same linguistic precision that characterises the rest of the collection. She doesn’t need to say much – there is plenty of white space on these pages – because her impeccable formal control makes each word work hard.
There are throat-achingly beautiful poems in here, unfashionably restrained poems and self-consciously formal poems, and even the ones that fall flat do so elegantly. Some are too icily erudite for their own good – poems about Einstein and Coleridge, and Chaucerian allusions, seem over-dutiful and forced. But there is an undeniable allure in moments like, “this is the time of the dark half/the serpent days of seem”, increasingly appealing as October rushes by. Or, unintentionally apt for the madness of Michaelmas term, “I live the world too fast, too far/secondary, several”.
Greenlaw has written that “opera and poetry are difficult and obscure, and ought to be sold on the joy of difficulty”, and these poems are, at times, unashamedly ‘difficult’ – but it would be hard to accuse Greenlaw of the excess obliquity of which contemporary poetry is so often guilty. ‘The Catch’, for instance, is the kind of poem that make excerpting painful: I want to include the whole thing, to make sure I’m not alone in shivering slightly when Greenlaw promises “One day I’ll learn to listen/to the city beneath the snow/the agony in the irony/the lover as I go”.
“To move small, sleep low/and dream new depths/of emptiness and order” – this encapsulates Greenlaw’s poetics – but then, of course, “to be troubled by neither”. This collection is all the more brilliant for the way it manages to take itself seriously as poetry while retaining that promised casualness of approach.
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