The poet communicates ‘what we felt at what we saw’
MARIA JOHNSTON
THE VAST EXTENT
On seeing and not seeing further
LAVINIA GREENLAW
320pp. Faber. £20.
SELECTED POEMS LAVINIA GREENLAW
128pp. Faber. Paperback, £14.99.
THE power of vision, *our infant sight', is both our torment and our salvation", A John Ashbery surmised in a review of Elizabeth Bishop's Complete Poems in 1969. This verdict would serve as an appropriately double-edged epigraph for the poet Lavinia Greenlaw's new collection of richly meditated, strikingly conversational essays, The Vast Extent: On seeing and not seeing further, in which questions to do with the limits and possibilities of seeing, of artistic representation, scientific exploration, memory and travel, are brought into kaleidoscopic focus. Bishop has long been a vital artistic lodestar for Greenlaw, and when, in an essay entitled “Disorder, Slippage, Glare”, she stresses that the “intimacy” of Bishop’s poetry is “not that of sharing the self. What she shares, to a remarkable degree, is what she sees”, we understand that Greenlaw, like all poets in their prose, is laying the tracks for her own readers to follow. And follow we must as the poet’s intensely probing gaze scrutinizes worlds, words and images, taking the reader through cave systems and across Arctic landscapes, the New York City skyline and the sea around New Zealand, veering into the lonelier, though no less testing, spaces of death, loss and breakage. She always returns to the places where thought comes alive – the darkroom, art gallery, installation space, peepshow or cinema – and wherein our own fluid, contradictory selves come alive too, opening up to doubt, unsettlement and wonder.
“Exploded essays” is Greenlaw’s term for these deliberately open-ended prose compositions. This calls to mind not only the “exploded view” diagrams of technical drawing, but also a famous remark from Emily Dickinson’s letters: “When I try to organise – my little Force explodes”. In her earlier memoir-cum-manifesto Some Answers Without Questions (TLS, January 28, 2022), Greenlaw reads Dickinson’s declaration as an apt metaphor for the process of writing: “it is the attempt at organisation that brings about the explosion”. The result is a tissue of connected texts and accompanying images that operate as endlessly shifting configurations, signalling back and forth to each other suggestively while also detonating far beyond the book’s parameters. Reading, like seeing (like writing), is provisional; it involves going back as well as forwards, incorporating linkages, interruptions, diversions and second thoughts. At one point Greenlaw quotes the Latvian American artist Vija Celmins’s definition of drawing as “thinking, evidence of getting
