The casual perfect - Lavinia Greenlaw

If Lavinia Greenlaw's Minsk was about home, her new collection
tests the proximities of elsewhere, 'the circle round our house', the
road between two lives. Its title recalls a phrase of Robert Lowell's to
describe Elizabeth Bishop -- one of the book's presiding spirits, with
her insistence on the provisional, on the moment in which perception is
formed, on landscape as action rather than description. The Casual
Perfect continues Lavinia Greenlaw's explorations of light and the
borders of vision, which include a journey to the four corners of
Britain to observe the solstices and equinoxes, and a cycle about the
East Anglian landscape which is nine-tenths sky. Questions of travel
hover around many of these poems, or questions which need to be
'travelled fully' rather than answered -- and which involve the
overheard and the glimpsed, what is gleaned from traces and external
signs. The result is a collection that is under-stated, spare but
inclusive, which invites our presence as readers.