The Vast Extent

'[Greenlaw] wields her erudition lightly.' Sunday Times 'Remarkable, visionary.' CELIA PAUL 'Indescribably brilliant.' Daily Telegraph 'Kaleidoscopic.' Guardian 'A rare pleasure . . . rewarding and thought-provoking.' Irish Times From the celebrated poet, novelist and memoirist, The Vast Extent is a constellation of 'exploded essays' about light and image, seeing and the unseen. Each is a record of how thought builds and ideas emerge, aligning art, myth, strange voyages and scientific scrutiny with a poet's response so that they cast light upon each other. In this original and illuminating work, Lavinia Greenlaw invites us to observe our world and beyond with a new sensitivity.

Lavinia Greenlaw was born in London where she has lived for most of her life. She studied seventeenth-century art at the Courtauld Institute, and was awarded a NESTA fellowship to pursue her interest in vision, travel and perception. Her poetry includes Minsk, which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot, Forward and Whitbread Poetry Prizes. She has also published novels and works of non-fiction which include The Importance of Music to Girls,Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland and Some Answers Without Questions (2021). She has won a number of prizes and held residencies at the Science Museum and the Royal Society of Medicine. Her work for BBC radio includes programmes about the Arctic, the Baltic, Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop.