A book that uses poetry to talk about difficulty, and vice versa As Lavinia Greenlaw readily admits, ''The idea of poetry tends to make people feel stupid, anxious or bored.'' Poetry can appear to be inherently ''difficult''; our immediate impulse, to baulk or turn away. But in this wonderfully lucid investigation, Greenlaw invites us to do the opposite: to dwell with her in the uneasiness of difficulty. She looks at why we might both crave and fear difficulty, how we use and perform it, how our relationship to it might expose habits of thought and approach that can be productively dismantled. By entertaining the possibility of difficulty, she argues, we might allow ourselves to get more truthfully at what it is we really need to say. With characteristic poise and clarity, and using plentiful examples, Greenlaw turns over moments of opacity and resistance to show us how difficulty might in fact contain its own solution.

Autorentext

Lavinia Greenlaw was born in London. She studied seventeenth-century art at the Courtauld Institute, and was the first artist in residence at the Science Museum. Her awards include a Nesta Fellowship, the Ted Hughes Award for her immersive soundwork, Audio Obscura, and a Wellcome Engagement Fellowship. She has published six collections of poetry with Faber, including Minsk (2003), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot, Forward and Whitbread Poetry prizes, A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde (2014) which was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award, and The Built Moment (2019). Her novels include In the City of Love's Sleep (2018), and her non-fiction includes The Importance of Music to Girls (2007), Some Answers Without Questions (2021) and The Vast Extent: On Seeing and Not Seeing Further (2024). Her Selected Poems was published in 2024. She is Emeritus Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Klappentext

A book that uses poetry to talk about difficulty, and vice versa

As Lavinia Greenlaw readily admits, 'The idea of poetry tends to make people feel stupid, anxious or bored.' Poetry can appear to be inherently 'difficult'; our immediate impulse, to baulk or turn away. But in this wonderfully lucid investigation, Greenlaw invites us to do the opposite: to dwell with her in the uneasiness of difficulty.

She looks at why we might both crave and fear difficulty, how we use and perform it, how our relationship to it might expose habits of thought and approach that can be productively dismantled. By entertaining the possibility of difficulty, she argues, we might allow ourselves to get more truthfully at what it is we really need to say.

With characteristic poise and clarity, and using plentiful examples, Greenlaw turns over moments of opacity and resistance to show us how difficulty might in fact contain its own solution.