{"id":416,"date":"2021-05-04T09:51:03","date_gmt":"2021-05-04T08:51:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/?p=416"},"modified":"2021-05-04T09:51:03","modified_gmt":"2021-05-04T08:51:03","slug":"the-built-moment-by-lavinia-greenlaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/2021\/05\/04\/the-built-moment-by-lavinia-greenlaw\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Built Moment” by Lavinia Greenlaw"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Lavinia Greenlaw\u2019s most recent poetry collection, The Built Moment<\/em> is split into two sections, the first of which explores her father\u2019s journey with dementia. The poems included are, in my opinion, some of the finest and most memorable writing about dementia I\u2019ve come across whilst reading extensively on the subject. I\u2019ve repeatedly found that poetry, with its use of white space, metaphor and resonant language provides a good vehicle through which to express some of the more difficult to quantify aspects of dementia. Greenlaw\u2019s writing blew me away. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a warmth to these poems which reveals the relationship between the poet and her father and this often translates into a kind of desperation where the poet admits her own inability to help or arrest the progress of the illness, \u201cI tell him I am saving him as quickly as I can<\/em>.\u201d There are even moments of genuine humour. I particularly enjoyed \u201cThe Finishing Line\u201d where the poet\u2019s brother, sitting at his father\u2019s bedside, shares an anecdote about running a race dressed as a gorilla. It reminded me of the muddle and mixed emotions of tending to a much-loved family member\u2019s illness where all the feelings sit close to the surface: sorrow, grief, and also joy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, the thing I found most moving about The Built Moment was Greenlaw\u2019s ability to pin down in words, the experiential side of dementia both from her own and her father\u2019s perspective. It\u2019s notoriously difficult -I know, I\u2019ve tried- to write about an experience as strange as dementia when it isn\u2019t something you\u2019ve been through yourself in your own mind and body. Greenlaw uses evasive, slippery, meandering phrases and words to effectively convey how it must feel to be present and also becoming absent at the same time. \u201cMy father has lost his way out of the present.\/ Something is stopping him leaving, nothing becomes\/ the immediate past.\u201d <\/em>One poem is called \u201cMy father has no shadow\u201d and another, \u201cWhile he can still speak,\u201d in which he talks to his hands and legs as he gets dressed, suggesting he now sits at some distance from his own self. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s the use of language which has had me returning to this collection repeatedly over the last year or so. Greenlaw more than most writers I\u2019ve come across is using words to say the unsayable. She does so with a masterful lightness of touch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Built Moment was published by Faber & Faber in 2019<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lavinia Greenlaw\u2019s most recent poetry collection, The Built Moment is split into two sections, the first of which explores her father\u2019s journey with dementia. The poems included are, in my opinion, some of the finest and most memorable writing about dementia I\u2019ve come across whilst reading extensively on the subject. I\u2019ve repeatedly found that poetry, with its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":901,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[5,30,6,9,29],"class_list":["post-416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-carers","tag-english","tag-family","tag-man","tag-poetry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/901"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":417,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions\/417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}