Lavinia Greenlaw, A Double Sorrow, Troilus and Criseyde (Faber)Lavinia Greenlaw's poems will be the subject of discussion at a forthcoming meeting of the Portsmouth Poetry Society and so I availed myself a copy of Minsk in order that I might shed some light on the subject. I'm afraid it won't be much light, though, because I didn't find a great deal that did much for me (which, in cases like this, is always attributable to a failing in me and not the poet). So I was glad to be given a timely second chance when finding her version of Trolius & Criseyde was imminent.
The story from the seige of Troy has been retold a number of times and it was Chaucer's version that persuaded me that there was more to Chaucer than a disappointing A level result. Lavinia's new re-telling is, it says, 'an imaginative reconstruction'. In a book of seven-line tableaux, she threads through the story in an accumulating set of moments, sometimes narrative but mostly lyrical pieces that do various things with the stanza form taken from Chaucer. Boccaccio is the other source acknowledged with a note on each page of exactly which lines we are at. It is easily read at one sitting, which for most of us the Chaucer isn't, and that is the best way to approach it. I rarely read a book of poems in order from beginning to end but pick pieces from one place and another but that doesn't work with this, for obvious reasons but also that the poems thus gather more power which few of them have if read in isolation. It is a long poem in many parts, not a collection of poems and I resolutely try to deny anything the status of 'sequence' whenever I can because I have an aversion to the term that there is apparently no treatment for.
The seventh line of the seven line stanzas is often the memorable one,
For love to be for more than love's sake.
or
She says she is now more his than her own.
or
I still don't know how to unlove her.
I waited with some anticipation for my favourite passage from Chaucer, possibly one of my most memorable passages in English Literature, Book 5, Stanzas 80-83, in which Troilus rides past the places that bring back memories of his time with Criseyde,
And yonder have I heard full lustily
My dear herte laugh; and yonder pleye
Saw I her ones eke full blissfully;
And yonder ones to me gan she saye,
'Now, goode sweete, love me well I praye'
but the moment passes a little underwhelmingly and Lavinia makes more of Troilus's despair than his nostalgia,
He knows
what they say: he's in the grip of the most
Tremendous hope and dread.
It looks to them like delusion.
He hides his subject in verse.
Long songs he sings to no one.
It was never to be expected that a contemporary poet was going to produce a version of this poem to immediately rival Chaucer's, with its 600 years in the canon. Poetry perhaps isn't like that anymore, for better and for worse. But it has psychological depth and one feels Lavinia's empathy with the characters, as well as the wily Pandarus. The stanza form is put through any number of variations and one is unlikely to read a 200 page poem quite so quickly.
And, most of all, I'm glad I will have some generous things to say about Lavinia Greenlaw when she comes under discussion by our little group of poetry admirers.