I circle back to these things like I’ve circled back to the place itself. My imagination is stubbornly lodged. It’s those lights in the half-empty houses. It’s those mists. Maybe it’s the chips. It’s about never knowing what might wash in.
Smugness is not a quality to cultivate, but I can’t tell you that it isn’t immensely satisfying not to have to worry about all of the above when travelling light. It isn’t always possible, of course – work trips, longer holidays – but when it is, it’s perhaps the closest thing to feeling free. It’s a twist on that hole-in-a-sack riddle: what can you pack that will make your bag light? Nothing.
Time – what it is, how it shifts, what happens when we lose our grip on it – is at the heart of Lavinia Greenlaw’s new collection. The first section describes, in snatched, harrowing glimpses, her father’s descent into dementia, a state in which the present is the only available tense; in the second, her grief, which is a function of memory, plunges her into the fourth dimension. In both halves, there’s a subtlety and an intellectual curiosity to Greenlaw’s interrogation of this most fundamental subject that belies the wrench and rawness of the material: through her use of form, micro and macro, she manages to exemplify both her father’s experience of time and her own.
It is no small feat to capture the texture of youth, at once universal and unique, without sliding into the sentimental. To render it in the well-worn streets of the United States’s most lionized city is another task entirely. Part coming-of-age novel, part social critique, Dana Czapnik’s The Falconer uses New York City in the ’90s as a point of comparison to remind us that not much has changed in the ways in which women are allowed to grow up.
Michael Frayn once said that we would see the suburbs as “a gigantic piece of folk art” if we could only learn to look at them obliquely “through the imagination they were designed to appeal to”. Half of Thorn wants to do this oblique looking – the half of her that still has what she calls “suburban bones”. The other half remains that jaded teenager at a bus stop, daydreaming of escape.