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Faber, £12.99, ISBN 057121780

Reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop, but retaining its own uniqueness, the music of Minsk is so clear it rings. This is a collection that travels to chilly places: Belarus, Finland, Norway and the Arctic Circle. It is also a collection that keeps coming home and the epigraph from e. e. cummings, “your homecoming will be my homecoming”, resonates throughout, since, in Greenlaw’s words, “wherever// you get to is not far, still nowhere, so/ there’s nothing for it but to head home”. In Minsk, homecoming is no easy moment of nostalgia; rather it’s a kind of compulsion described well in “Essex Rag”, and also in “Zombies”, which asks: “Did we not remember the curse of this place? / How Sundays drank our blood as we watched / dry paint or the dust on the television screen”.

Accurately capturing childhood in the sticks or “the fields of our years of boredom”, Lavinia Greenlaw seizes on moments of escapism. “The Spirit of the Staircase” recalls the game of sliding down the stairs with siblings, and introduces images of flight and the sublime that haunt other poems in the collection. I say “haunt” since there is a sense that the poetic speaker is cummings’s “shadow phantom effigy of seeming”, communicating from the threshold between reality and dream: “my brother and I once woke up
finishing / a conversation begun in a dream”. The ghostly speaker possesses a precise and frosty vision that keeps returning to the image of glass, whether it is the children sliding down the stairs and “grinding the carpet to glass”, the membrane of a mother’s contact lens in “The Dissection Room”, the glass encountered by an airy eight-year-old in “The Falling City”, “silica” or the Arctic of the sparkling poem “Kaamos”where “winter has set in my body / like
a drink of glass”.

In spite of the recurrent evocations of icy paralysis,Minsk does not falter from feeling.Drawing on the Belarussian painter,Kasimir Malevich,Greenlaw offers us a heightened awareness of the limits of language, sight, and space: “I stared / myself to stone.My vision failed: / things went first at the edges”. The pared down sentences, the careful line breaks, the adept use of form, the quiet rhythms and the startling imagery create a sense of reading at high altitude. The epigraph to Part Two is from Rilke’s “The Second Elegy”: “For we, when we feel, evaporate; oh, we / breathe ourselves out and away . . .”. A fantastic poem, “Against Rhetoric”, refers to the correspondence between Lord Chandos and Sir Francis Bacon to explore how “When things lift away from themselves, / we can do no more in words than meet them / with a similar”. Faced with the question “Why not remain speechless?”, the poem alludes to the “dizziness” experienced by Theaetetus “when asked to see beyond what is named. His sickness was wonder”.

Minsk is a restless collection moving through a comical sequence on
London Zoo (with an excellent portrait of a peacock), references to Scott Joplin, Otis Blackwell and Tom Jones, and poems that dwell on the Classical past of Dante’s Inferno, Protogenes, Geryon and Goethe’s Faust. Most of all I was drawn to the magical final sequences of Part Three,“A Drink of Glass” and “The Land of Giving In”, which remember Osip Mandelstam, Ibsen and the early Norwegian literature of the Poetic Edda to conjure the Finnish “sininen hetki ”, a calm hour originally the moment between daylight and dusk when “Light draws back / behind the rim of the eye as it closes”. Like Theaetetus, the reader of Minsk is sent reeling.