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Poem of the Week: ‘Actaeon’ by Lavinia Greenlaw

28 July 2025

Our Poem of the Week is ‘Actaeon’ by Lavinia Greenlaw, featured in her Selected Poems.
He walks his mind as a forest and sends of himself into dark places to which he cannot tell the way. The hunt comes on and he in his nerves streams ahead – hounds flung after a scent so violent no matter the path or what’s let fall. A burst of clearing. Water beads and feathers her presence as she thickens and curves. He says words to himself not to look but his eyes are of their own and she at their centre a dark star contracting to itself discarding wave on wave on flare on fountain. His skull erupting, branching . . . And his blood is shaken down. And he is all fours. And his noise. And his hounds.

Copyright © Lavinia Greenlaw, 2011. Used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.

Read all our poems of the week.

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Lavinia Greenlaw: Selected Poems
Lavinia Greenlaw: Selected Poems
Lavinia Greenlaw
£14.99

This Selected Poems offers the perfect introduction to a distinguished body of work that has established Lavinia Greenlaw as one of the most perceptive and original poets of her generation.

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