The Built Moment, Professor Greenlaw's latest poetry collection, explores themes of time, grief, and memory through a sequence of poems about her father's dementia.
Professor Lavinia Greenlaw's moving new poetry collection The Built Moment, is available from 7th February online and in stores.
Professor Greenlaw recently appeared on BBC Radio's Front Row programme to discuss her latest work and the structure of the collection which represents not only loss, but also the act of building out of loss. Click here to listen in a new tab (Professor Greenlaw's interview will begin at the 14-minute mark): https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0002bns
From Faber's website:
'The first section, ‘The Sea is an Edge and an Ending’, is a sequence of poems about her father’s dementia and his disappearance into the present tense. It is not a narrative of illness so much as a meditation on the metaphysics of memory and loss. What does it mean to exist only in the present, for your sense of self to come loose and for the past to float free? The second section, ‘The Bluebell Horizontal’, looks towards possibility, and proposes new frameworks in the face of loss. It includes a prayer, a blessing and a speculation on why we cling on to pain. There are structures that arrest remembering and forgetting, and the fundamental arrest of a poet’s difficulty with words.
'The Built Moment masterfully demonstrates how, as we get older and death becomes more a part of life, what we build and what we break out of become more important than ever.'
