The Vast Extent by Lavinia Greenlaw review – a cabinet of curiosities | Essays

“Exploded essays”, the poet, novelist and memoirist Lavinia Greenlaw calls the 17 pieces of almost-art-critical prose in this bright, mournful book. The phrase suggests a bristling diagram or enlarged view, an annotated arc of thought or feeling. But also something violently botched or ruined – don’t all essays worth the name aspire, more or less secretly, to blowing up their own form? In revisiting a lifetime of looking – at art, landscapes, weather, heavenly bodies, human faces and sometimes nothing at all – Greenlaw puts certain stark questions to herself and the things she looks at: “How do we make sense of what we see? How do we describe what we have never seen before?”

Her title comes from John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1689. But the wealth and vagrancy of Greenlaw’s interests seem to connect her to the earlier part of that busy century, and further back into the 16th: the time of the cabinet of curiosities. The “image storm” of early modernity is a recurring theme: there are rapt and keen descriptions of animal studies by Joris Hoefnagel, a perspective model (now in the National Gallery) by Samuel van Hoogstraten, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Lucretia. Infinite riches in a little room: Greenlaw’s Wunderkammer also contains the photography of Francesca Woodman, sculptures by Eva Hesse and Rachel Whiteread, the discovery and lethal manufacture of radium, the naming of clouds by Luke Howard, the lives and works of JM Barrie and Virginia Woolf. Also: the author’s own excursions in the Alps, the Arctic, East Anglia and the dark remembered woods of her youth.

Greenlaw’s instinct with these topics is to “place them in arrangement while keeping the parts apart”: the essayist as collector. Her task, however, is as much poetic as curatorial or taxonomic – of course there is already a kind of poetry in simply setting one thing alongside another. Greenlaw, who comes from a family of scientists and medical professionals, wants to see the world clearly – in 1995 she was the first artist in residence at the Science Museum – and also plunge into obscurity. Even better, into ambiguity: the “fuzzy” quality of things as she grew shortsighted at the age of 12, a purely decorative sham bridge at Kenwood House in Hampstead, the velvet night of childhood camping trips. Clouds across the moon, the streaming firmament: how much of it do we really know by merely seeing it?

Not much, Greenlaw’s astrophysicist brother might have said. He died while she was writing The Vast Extent, and the book ends abruptly, but beautifully, with a long letter he wrote to her in the 1980s, explaining the origins of physical elements. Greenlaw’s late father is an intermittent presence too: a former Spitfire pilot who recalled flying blind, by instruments alone, through cloud at night, then climbing into glorious moonlight. Late in life, living with Alzheimer’s, he wrote in his notebook: “The shadow – an experience of solitude”. He had fallen (or risen?) into “a state of undiscriminating wonder”. In an extraordinary passage, Greenlaw faces her dying father’s newly innocent gaze: “He looked into my eyes with absolute, unqualified love and I was able to meet his look with my own”.

Given her frequent scientific and historical reference points, Greenlaw may seem a coolly cerebral poet and prose writer, except when she burns with rage – as in her last book, Some Answers without Questions, with its accounts of silencing misogyny – or is blindsided by the sublime. The Vast Extent is punctuated by interviews with scientists and physicians on the subject of seeing, and footnotes that direct the reader to a related essay elsewhere in the book. The expert dialogues and the signposts alike seem unnecessary, because the essayistic seduction of a book like this lies in voice, texture and correspondence. Or in occasional aphoristic touches: “If you stay put, you become alert to the patterns and rhythms that underpin the world around you”. And if we don’t quite see what the author sees, or in the way she sees – that is also part of the point of Greenlaw’s attentive and adventuring style.

The Vast Extent: On Seeing and Not Seeing Further by Lavinia Greenlaw is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

“Exploded essays”, the poet, novelist and memoirist Lavinia Greenlaw calls the 17 pieces of almost-art-critical prose in this bright, mournful book. The phrase suggests a bristling diagram or enlarged view, an annotated arc of thought or feeling. But also something violently botched or ruined – don’t all essays worth the name aspire, more or less secretly, to blowing up their own form? In revisiting a lifetime of looking – at art, landscapes, weather, heavenly bodies, human faces and sometimes nothing at all – Greenlaw puts certain stark questions to herself and the things she looks at: “How do we make sense of what we see? How do we describe what we have never seen before?”

Her title comes from John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1689. But the wealth and vagrancy of Greenlaw’s interests seem to connect her to the earlier part of that busy century, and further back into the 16th: the time of the cabinet of curiosities. The “image storm” of early modernity is a recurring theme: there are rapt and keen descriptions of animal studies by Joris Hoefnagel, a perspective model (now in the National Gallery) by Samuel van Hoogstraten, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Lucretia. Infinite riches in a little room: Greenlaw’s Wunderkammer also contains the photography of Francesca Woodman, sculptures by Eva Hesse and Rachel Whiteread, the discovery and lethal manufacture of radium, the naming of clouds by Luke Howard, the lives and works of JM Barrie and Virginia Woolf. Also: the author’s own excursions in the Alps, the Arctic, East Anglia and the dark remembered woods of her youth.

Greenlaw’s instinct with these topics is to “place them in arrangement while keeping the parts apart”: the essayist as collector. Her task, however, is as much poetic as curatorial or taxonomic – of course there is already a kind of poetry in simply setting one thing alongside another. Greenlaw, who comes from a family of scientists and medical professionals, wants to see the world clearly – in 1995 she was the first artist in residence at the Science Museum – and also plunge into obscurity. Even better, into ambiguity: the “fuzzy” quality of things as she grew shortsighted at the age of 12, a purely decorative sham bridge at Kenwood House in Hampstead, the velvet night of childhood camping trips. Clouds across the moon, the streaming firmament: how much of it do we really know by merely seeing it?

Not much, Greenlaw’s astrophysicist brother might have said. He died while she was writing The Vast Extent, and the book ends abruptly, but beautifully, with a long letter he wrote to her in the 1980s, explaining the origins of physical elements. Greenlaw’s late father is an intermittent presence too: a former Spitfire pilot who recalled flying blind, by instruments alone, through cloud at night, then climbing into glorious moonlight. Late in life, living with Alzheimer’s, he wrote in his notebook: “The shadow – an experience of solitude”. He had fallen (or risen?) into “a state of undiscriminating wonder”. In an extraordinary passage, Greenlaw faces her dying father’s newly innocent gaze: “He looked into my eyes with absolute, unqualified love and I was able to meet his look with my own”.

Given her frequent scientific and historical reference points, Greenlaw may seem a coolly cerebral poet and prose writer, except when she burns with rage – as in her last book, Some Answers without Questions, with its accounts of silencing misogyny – or is blindsided by the sublime. The Vast Extent is punctuated by interviews with scientists and physicians on the subject of seeing, and footnotes that direct the reader to a related essay elsewhere in the book. The expert dialogues and the signposts alike seem unnecessary, because the essayistic seduction of a book like this lies in voice, texture and correspondence. Or in occasional aphoristic touches: “If you stay put, you become alert to the patterns and rhythms that underpin the world around you”. And if we don’t quite see what the author sees, or in the way she sees – that is also part of the point of Greenlaw’s attentive and adventuring style.

The Vast Extent: On Seeing and Not Seeing Further by Lavinia Greenlaw is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.