Caves, storms, Diana – these poetic essays are indescribably brilliant
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Lavinia Greenlaw is best known as a poet. In fact, the publication by Faber and Faber of her new book of essays, The Vast Extent, coincides with that of her Selected Poems, which ranges from her brilliant debut collection, Night Photograph (1993), to the most recent, The Built Moment (2019), with its poems about her father’s dementia: “When his mind perceives itself failing / like an engine questioning its parts, everything stops / and he sees what it will be like when everything stops”.
Yet Greenlaw is also a novelist, sound artist, radio dramatist and librettist. She was the first artist-in-residence at the Science Museum in London, has served as the chair of the Poetry Society, and is both a council member of the Royal Society of Literature and a professor at Royal Holloway. Her truly astonishing range and accomplishments are reflected in this truly astonishing non-fiction book, which she describes as the consolidation of 30 years of work attending to a number of fundamental questions, including “How do we make sense of what we see?” and “How do we describe what we have never seen before?”
The Vast Extent is sui generis. Greenlaw describes its form as “the exploded essay”, a series of short chapters that “align artworks, myth, strange voyages, scientific scrutiny, reminiscence… [and] a poet’s response” to subjects including “early photography, caves, myopia, bad weather, mountains, microscopes, gilding and the commercial uses of radium”. Add to this her training in 17th-century Netherlandish art and her interest in “the Early Modern period in Northern Europe, in particular the formation of empiricism”, and you’ll begin to understand the achievement involved in marshalling the book’s material, never mind the kaleidoscope of insights that it contains.
Greenlaw wanted to “unsettle my subjects so that they tilted a little”. To take just one example of her at full tilt, there’s a chapter titled “Unanchoring, sinking, at sea”, which begins with the arresting sentence: “The double passivity of being a passenger and being at sea can be unbearable.” This leads to a reminiscence about crossing the Irish Sea by ferry as a child, then memories of a whale-watching trip to New Zealand in her thirties, the strange appearance of boats in medieval art, a retelling of the story of Tristan and Isolde, reflections on the nature of storms, remarks on Constable’s Rainstorm over the Sea and the work of Latvian artist Vija Celmins, before returning to further observations about deep-sea life and, indeed, life in general. “At sea, it is difficult to make sense of how fast you’re moving, how far you are from land or how long it will take you to reach port. Your senses either flail or contract as you adapt to the lack of co-ordinates.”
Chapter after chapter follows this sort of careful pattern. A trip to the cinema is connected seamlessly with the discovery of the Chauvet Cave paintings in 1994. The work of JM Barrie is spliced with both excerpts from Greenlaw’s father’s notebooks and an interview with the great neurobiologist Colin Blakemore. A trip to New York prompts a discussion of the statue of the goddess Diana, the invention of radium and our perceptions of light: “The lamp in the window welcomes you whereas the security light makes you pull back. The small light is something you can remain outside even as you come close. It will not consume you like the bleaching slice of light that might be triggered by your step.”
The Vast Extent is true not only to its title but also to its dedicatee, Greenlaw’s brother Reynold, a scientist with whom she would discuss both philosophy and astrophysics. “My brother died recently,” she writes, “and this book is dedicated to him as an extension of our lifelong conversation.” Now you can both imagine that conversation and become a part of it.
The Vast Extent is published by Faber at £20. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
