If you want to get ahead in this world, get a lawyer - not a book,' advised the writer Fran Lebowitz. Lavinia Greenlaw seems to have taken this advice to heart; she recently became poet-in-residence at Mishcon de Reya at a salary of £10,000 for an afternoon a week. It is good business for Mishcon too, as Greenlaw is a fantastically sensible poet, unlikely to jeopardise its bold venture with embarrassing displays of irascibility, drunkenness, or absurd egomania. She is, instead, a rather gentle kind of person - neat, petite, and self-possessed. 

This is a girl who discovered music and poetry with the kind of ardour that other girls in her small Essex village applied to boys and fashion. She describes herself as a friendless, bullied adolescent, seeking solace in the volumes of poetry on her parents' shelves. 'I was lonely for years,' she admits, matter-of-factly. A lot of time was spent in my head.'

Settled now in north London with poet Michael Hofmann and her daughter, Georgia, she is enjoying the life of a freelance writer. Working at home seems ideal for someone who describes herself as 'inarticulate' and 'unsociable'. Yet there is no denying her pluck. Deliberately disdaining poets such as Auden and Yeats who were taught in a 'formulaic way' at school, she chose to read those of Eastern Europe or America. She was, too, once a die-hard New Wave Punk, eschewing classical music for a while in favour of x-Ray Spex and Joy Division, unnerving the neighbours even more.

She wrote reams of teenage poetry but it was not until she was 26 that Stand magazine accepted one of her poems. The birth of her daughter in 1987, though, proved a far greater creative watershed, thanks to ‘the isolation and lack of sleep that makes everything feel more acute'.

The fact that both her parents are doctors and all three siblings pursued careers based in scientific research has helped create the unusual confluence of dreaminess and hard-boiled precision in her work. Her first full collection of poems, Night Photograph (1993), earned her a certain scientific notoriety - so much so that during 1995 she was writer-in-residence at the Science Museum. It was an appropriate base for a poet intrigued by the nature of change and attracted to the immutability of elements. That collection also ensured her a place on the Next Generation Poets promotion of 1994, which sought to identify the best British poets under 40, and has meant a lot of public readings. How, I wonder, does she cope with that? 'Usually, my head is clear even if from the neck down feels uncontrolled,' she answers.

Many of her poems, especially in the new collection, A World Where News Travelled Slowly, provoke the same response: a vivid awareness of her point which nevertheless is difficult to articulate, more a gut feeling than a cerebral connection. 'I have tried,' she says, 'to be more emotional in this book, because that's what poets should aim for.’ Flickering sensual passion, love, guilty joy, and just plain guilt surface here, reflecting, as Greenlaw intended, some of the circumstances of her own life, but intelligible to all. She says she is always conscious of the reader, for that is, after all, what forms the personal into a poem. And for Greenlaw, perhaps, that is the pleasure of it expressing in her concise and eloquent way the emotions she would otherwise bottle up.

Some of the poems in this new collection are pensive, almost painful: in 'Underworld', for example -

What if you have swallowed me,
swallowed six pomegranate seeds
and split your life? Must I let you go
down alone into each night as winter,
the path behind you freezing over?

Salt, snow, the stars, winter, are the leitmotifs of Greenlaw's work, and, talking to her it is clear why their suggestive purity, their white coolness, would appeal to her. She laughs when I point this out, and adds that they remind her, too, of blank spaces. In 1994 she wrote, 'I don't know where poems come from. I spent a long time struggling with ways in which we make sense at all.' Three years later, she is still investigating those ways. In A World Where News Travelled Slowly, Greenlaw's play with the facts of science is twinned with a burgeoning freedom of her senses. Salt, she says, is especially attractive, because although it is an earthy chemical compound, like, say, iron oxide, you can savour it, lick it, taste it on someone else.

First published in Harpers & Queen, 1997
All pictures © Nicola J Walker.