A hypnotic collection from one of the leading poets of her generation.

Poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw's poetic reflections on William Morris's Icelandic Journal, one of the overlooked masterpieces of travel literature

The great Victorian designer and decorative artist William Morris was fascinated by Iceland and wrote a book documenting his travels there. He gets caught up with questions of travel, noting his reaction to the idea of leaving or arriving, to hurry and delay, what it means to dread a place you've never been to or to encounter the actuality of a long-held vision. He is sensitive to the emotional landscape of his band of...

If Lavinia Greenlaw's 'Minsk' was about home, her new collection tests the proximities of elsewhere, 'the circle round our house', the road between two lives.

When Chaucer composed 'Troilus and Criseyde' he gave us, some say, his finest poem, and with it one of the most captivating love stories ever written. 'A Double Sorrow' takes its title from the opening line of that poem in a fresh telling of this most tortured of love affairs.

Galileo's wife, a young woman dying of radium poisoning, the first dog in space, a strangely obsessed concert pianist, an early beneficiary of plastic surgery, and a Russian boy whose adventures are sadly limited by the immature powers of the child who has conjured him up are just some of the figures encompassed by Lavinia Greenlaw's imagination.

Morris's intimate journals, written for a friend, unconsciously explore questions of travel, noting his reaction to the idea of leaving or arriving, to hurry and delay, what it means to dread a place you've never been to or to encounter the actuality of a long-held vision. Poet Lavinia Greenlaw draws out these questions as she follows in the footprints of Morris's prose, responding to its surfaces and undercurrents, extending its horizons. The result is a new and composite work, which brilliantly explores our conflicted reasons for not staying at home.

If I had not kissed anyone, or danced with anyone, or had a reason to cry, the music made me feel as if I had gone through all that anyway. This book tells the story of the adventures that music leads us into: getting drunk, falling in love, dying of boredom, cutting our hair, terrifying our parents, wanting to change the world.

In the City of Love's Sleep reveals love in all its inscrutable complexity: the raw nature of feeling and its uncontrollable, inconsistent, unsettling truths.