Minsk: Poems

"Theaetetus complained to Socrates
of dizziness when asked to see beyond what is
as it is named. His sickness was wonder."

-- from "Against Rhetoric: A Letter to Lord Chandos,1603"

Lavinia Greenlaw is a British poet who's published several books in the United Kingdom to much acclaim; Minsk is her first book released in the United States. She's been compared to Elizabeth Bishop for her plainspoken clarity and Wallace Stevens for her metaphysical spaces (and possibly because of their shared subtext of arctic landscapes, both inner and outer). Like Margaret Atwood, she explores the wildness of place and body; like W. S. Merwin, she frames large concepts with spacious words and an edged wit. Minsk is a lovely, cool-eyed look at the world as we remember and imagine it.

The book is divided into three sections, which could be loosely categorized as memories of childhood and adolescence in a small town, whose inhabitants are burning to get out; poems as imaginative riffs on influences and mythologies, often literary (including Goethe, Dante, Wodehouse, and Edmund Gosse); and investigations of the frigid and enveloping landscapes of the Arctic Circle. Her poems are populated with witches and wolves, mountains and forests; she has a calm and vast expanse of vision that can feel archetypal, and occasionally aphoristic.

There is also something Marianne Moore-ish about Greenlaw -- she traffics in strange and beautiful animals and exotic places, and can build a whole poem around a snippet from a letter or other out-of-context quotations. Her long poems, which are mostly organized as series, are arresting and complex compositions. In "A Strange Barn," Greenlaw explores the London Zoo, over a half-century, as an extended metaphor to interpret historical and political events (and evokes hints of Rilke). "Bright Earth" is an alphabetical catalog of chemical and color (alphabetical catalogs hold, I think, a particular fascination for many poets, and Greenlaw's succeeds admirably in that tradition), and "A Drink of Glass" and "The Land of Giving In" chart the seasons and cycles of the Arctic: "This is the time to live quietly/ to build nothing and tell stories....I feel patient, honest and kindly and cannot crack a smile."

I sent one of these poems to a friend of mine who doesn't read much poetry, and he was very impressed, noting that her range within the single poem was extraordinary, subtle and moving. Formally traditional yet compellingly personal, Minsk introduces a welcome poetic voice to a new audience.

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