The Vast Extent is a series of short texts on the subject of vision - pieces that cast light on one another. They encompass themes surrounding important (and often misunderstood) artworks, history and myth, strange voyages, scientific scrutiny and Lavinia Greenlaw's own reminiscences on a life richly and thoughtfully lived. These essays also feature historical figures who have had bearing on Greenlaw's thinking about seeing and perspective, including John Locke, Virginia Woolf, William Morris, Emily Dickinson and Francis Bacon, among others less familiar and more contemporary. Via conversations with scientists, philosophical thinkers and artists, Greenlaw gives us an entire 'exploded essay' of sorts, and opens up new possibilities for how we might perceive our worlds.

Features writing that is, in one sense or another, a reflection or lingering effect of poets and artists who have gone before.

'A pointed, svelte but diverse work.' Irish Times Part memoir, part manifesto, Some Answers Without Questions is an elegant, important and spirited work of self-investigation; the result of decades of answering questions that don't really matter-and not being asked the ones that do. 'A delight: approachable, rigorous and omnivorous in its frame of reference. . . a timely, lyrical investigation into what it means to create.' Observer

'Signs and Humours' brings together 100 poems to show how one of the most basic human concerns - the body - has continued to preoccupy, fascinate and agitate poets.

Morris's intimate journals, written for a friend, unconsciously explore questions of travel, noting his reaction to the idea of leaving or arriving, to hurry and delay, what it means to dread a place you've never been to or to encounter the actuality of a long-held vision. Poet Lavinia Greenlaw draws out these questions as she follows in the footprints of Morris's prose, responding to its surfaces and undercurrents, extending its horizons. The result is a new and composite work, which brilliantly explores our conflicted reasons for not staying at home.

If I had not kissed anyone, or danced with anyone, or had a reason to cry, the music made me feel as if I had gone through all that anyway . . . the music attracted and repelled, organised and disturbed and then let us into the night, clusters of emotion ready to dissolve into sleep. In The Importance of Music to Girls, Lavinia Greenlaw tells the story of the adventures that music leads us into: getting drunk, falling in love, dying of boredom, cutting our hair, terrifying our parents, wanting to change the world. This is a vivid memoir unlike any other, recalling the furious passion of being young, female, and coming alive through music.

Galileo's wife, a young woman dying of radium poisoning, the first dog in space, a strangely obsessed concert pianist, an early beneficiary of plastic surgery, and a Russian boy whose adventures are sadly limited by the immature powers of the child who has conjured him up are just some of the figures encompassed by Lavinia Greenlaw's imagination. The poet's level gaze as she contemplates the more bizarre aspects of science and of human behaviour lends further distinction to this, her first collection.

Lavinia Greenlaw's latest collection, The Casual Perfect (2011), focused on 'the achievement of the provisional'. In the near decade since writing those poems, she has found herself exploring what we build out of the provisional: beginnings and endings, arrivals and departures, and the moments we fix as memories, fixing too their joy and pain.

The Built Moment is divided into two sections. The first, 'The Sea is an Edge and an Ending', is a sequence of poems about her father's disappearance into Alzheimer's. It is not a narrative of illness so much as a meditation on the metaphysics of memory loss. What does it mean only to exist in the present, for your sense of self to come loose and for the past to float free? The second half of the book is called 'The Bluebell Horizontal'. If the first section is about loss (the verticals), this section is about possibility (the horizontals). It includes a prayer ('Men I Have Heard in the Night'), a blessing ('Fleur de Sel') and a speculation on why we cling on to pain ('The Break'). There are poems about Joy Division and David Bowie, and an elegy for first love. There are structures that arrest remembering and forgetting - monoliths and oubliettes - and the fundamental arrest of a poet's difficulty with words.

These poems are about what we make and hold onto and offer one another. They are also about how, as we get older and death becomes more and more a part of life, what we build and what we break out of becomes more important than ever.

A POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION Minsk, Lavinia Greenlaw's third collection, was shortlisted for the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection. From London Zoo to an Essex village and the Arctic Circle, Greenlaw explores questions of place - the childhood landscapes we leave behind, those we travel towards, and those like 'Minsk' which we believe to be missing from our lives. Greenlaw's restless, inquisitive tone builds to make Minsk a hypnotic collection from one of the leading poets of her generation.

Lavinia Greenlaw's first collection, Night Photograph, made an immediately favourable impact. Her second collection, A World Where News Travelled Slowly explores more local and personal matters. Its central theme is the unpredictable act of communication, from the mechanical to the miraculous. There are also poems that are concerned with attempts at preservation - plundered relics, the stately home, an iron lung. This volume serves to confirm the gifts Lavinia Greenlaw showed in her first book.

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.

Shortlisted for the 2014 Costa Poetry Award. When Chaucer composed Troilus and Criseyde he gave us, some say, his finest poem, and with it one of the most captivating love stories ever written. A Double Sorrow, Lavinia Greenlaw's new work, takes its title from the opening line of that poem in a fresh telling of this most tortured of love affairs. Set against the Siege of Troy, A Double Sorrow is the story of Trojan hero Troilus and his beloved Criseyde, whose traitorous father has defected to the Greeks and has persuaded them to ask for his daughter in an exchange of prisoners. In an attempt to save her, Troilus suggests that Criseyde flees the besieged city with him, but she knows that she will be universally condemned and looks instead to a temporary measure: pretending to submit to the exchange, while promising Troilus that she will return to him within ten days. But once in the company of the Greeks she soon realises the impossibility of her promise to Troilus, and in despair succumbs to another. Lavinia Greenlaw's pinpoint retelling of this heart-wrenching tale is neither a translation nor strictly a 'version' of Chaucer's work, but instead creates something new: a sequence of glimpses from the medieval poem that refine the psychological drama of the classical story through a process of detonation or amplification of image and phrase into original poems. In a series of skillfully crafted seven-line vignettes, the author creates a zoetrope that serves to illuminate the intensity with which these characters argue each other and themselves into and out of love. The result is a breathtaking and shattering read -contemporary and timeless - that builds into an unforgettable telling of this most heartbreaking of love stories.

The UEA Creative Writing MA presents its annual selection of new young poets. Founded in 1992, students and tutors on the course have included Owen Sheers, Kathy Simmonds, Hugo Williams and Anthony Thwaite.

A powerful, involving new novel, following on from the author's much-praised debut novel 'Mary George of Allnorthover'. 'An Irresponsible Age', Lavinia Greenlaw's extraordinary new novel, is set in London in 1990, with Thatcher still in power but the country unwilling to 'abandon an idea just because it proved to be a bad one'. In these hesitant times we follow the life of Juliet Clough and her three siblings, all of them interdependent in a not-quite enviable way, clinging together after the death of a brother and the retreat of their grieving parents. When Juliet, the focus of them all, is drawn into a complex love affair with the enigmatic Jacob, the others, too, find themselves falling in love, and then evading the consequences. None will admit what they are doing, or why.

Lavinia Greenlaw's mesmerising debut novel about growing up in the surreal banality of mid-'70s Essex. Lavinia Greenlaw puts before us the monochrome, immemorial middle England of the 1970s in all its dowdy glory, and has us see through the mercurial, bewitching Mary George's eyes how a seemingly static landscape is suddenly illuminated by the most vivid bursts of energy, colour and drama. Punk's torch flares into life and singes the fringes of England. Mary George bears witness and burns brighter still: she is more memorable than even the extraordinary events around her, and the reader will find it devastatingly hard to leave her company at the end of this exceptional debut about growing up under the shadow of an unknowable, inescapable small-town mystery.

Lavinia Greenlaw's selection from Morris's Icelandic Journal ('the best book of travel written by an English poet', and the least known) is interposed with her own 'questions of travel', which follow the footprints of Morris's prose, responding to its surfaces and undercurrents, extending its horizons. The result is a new and composite work, which brilliantly explores our conflicted reasons for not staying at home.

One of the most prestigious awards for the short story has reached its eleventh year. Hugely successful, the BBC National Short Story Award, in partnership with Booktrust, awards GBP15,000 to the winning author, with GBP3000 going to the runner-up.

The University of East Anglia is proud to announce its new anthologies of work from the prose (including life writing), poetry and scriptwriting strands from their world-renowned creative writing MA.

For the misfits, there will always be music. As the sound track to basement parties, late-night drives, and solitary rituals of self-pity, the right music gives context and momentum to the bewildering process of growing up. In this passionate, poetic memoir, Lavinia Greenlaw searches out diaries, LP covers, and old mix tapes to recall the torment and ecstasy of coming alive through music. "The Importance of Music to Girls "recalls the adventures that music makes possible: sneaking out, falling in love, cutting our hair off, terrifying our parents, and challenging the world. Greenlaw's memoir reminds us how powerfully music has influenced the growth of our minds, and how inspiring the right song can be.

Iris, a museum conservator in her late forties, is separating from her husband while bringing up two daughters.

Raif is a stalled academic, as uncertain of the past as he is of the future, whose girlfriend is about to move in with him.

When Iris and Raif first meet by chance, Iris suddenly turns away and starts to run. She is running from what this encounter has woken in her.

In the City of Love's Sleep is a contemporary story about what it means to fall in love in middle age. It charts the steps two people take towards one another and what it means to have taken those steps before.