Poetry: Many of the poems in Lavinia Greenlaw's third collection, Minsk - shortlisted for this year's Forward Prize - are like ice-cubes in a tray, each of them separate, yet forming part of a larger mass, writes Rosita Boland
The analogy of ice, and its associations with the Artic regions, refracted light, coldness, and an ability to freeze objects in time - like memory - is a particularly appropriate one for this book, since so much of it is actually located in Scandinavia.
One of Greenlaw's gifts is to make the familiar eerily surreal. Her zoo series, 'A Strange Barn', is particularly arresting. She uses the dates when the various cages and houses were established to examine the social history of those times, setting the exotic animals against that context and drawing thought-provoking and inventive comparisons. The poem, 'The Elephant Pavilion, 1965', opens with: 'The idea is a herd in a scrum/ trumpeting out of fear or just for fun./ The Americans bombed North Vietnam.'
Minsk is full of marvellous poems as fables. As a child, in 'Lupins', she hears real wolves howling in the nearby zoo - 'their howls would climb the hill/ like tall spikes of blue flowers' - and her urban landscape transforms into something wonderfully fictional, the stuff of dark fairytales.
In 'The Dissection Room', a fine poem about her parents, her mother meets her father for the first time as a medical student in a dissection room, her hand 'in a dead man's chest', literally searching for his heart: 'a text-book case/ of dextrocardia, heart in the wrong place'.
Darkness is the recurrent theme in this carefully ordered and intelligent collection. For Greenlaw, darkness is a place, as physical as any of the real landscapes she writes about. The first poem, 'The Spirit of the Staircase', is a poem of childhood recalling spontaneity and a true sense of freedom, with Greenlaw and her siblings tobogganing down the house stairs. It ends with her adult wish to return to that place, where darkness contained possibilities and beginnings, 'happy to set off again, alone/ back into the dark'.
'Kaamos', the title of one poem in a series set in Scandinavia, is the Finnish for its period of darkness when the sun never rises. How, Greenlaw wonders, do you literally live in darkness: 'Arctic winter has set in my body/ like a drink of glass'. By contrast, there is nowhere to hide in the blinding seasonal light of Arctic snow and ice. Greenlaw is fascinated by locks, keys and entrapment throughout Minsk, and the hard white light functions as a kind of cipher to encoding mysteries.
The last poem in the book, 'The Boat Back Into the Dark', resonates with hoped-for possibilities; an actual and metaphysical journey back into the place where things happen.
Rosita Boland is an Irish Times journalist and a poet. Her most recent collection, Dissecting the Heart, is published by Gallery Press
Minsk. By Lavinia Greenlaw, Faber and Faber, 69pp. €12.99