Brian Dillon at The Guardian:
“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.
more here.