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The Built Moment by Lavinia Greenaw review – coming to terms with grief

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This collection focuses on a father’s slide into dementia, and the daughter’s acceptance of time passing

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.

The poems, short and desolate, capture discrete, disconnected moments: their titles (“My father appears”, “My father’s weakness”, “My father rises whenever”, “My father tells me to wait”) amplify the sense of a man who has shattered into pieces, and is unable to put himself back together. But by building these poems one on top of the other into a coherent whole, Greenlaw overlays his fractured present with her own narrative sense of past and future. Through this collection, she is reconstructing his fragmented history by incorporating it into her own.

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