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@LaviniaGreenlaw ‘Some Questions Without Answers’ is published today. I read this and feel she is my mouthpiece; an eerily familiar collection of reflection and thought pieces to return to. @FaberBooks

Lavinia Greenlaw's 'Some Answers Without Questions' is a brilliant book: a series of short personal essays on topics including writing, gender, singing, dancing, anger and place, but perhaps linked by the idea of voice, and Greenlaw's development of her own voice. Male readers come in for a fair bit of (entirely justified!) criticism throughout this book, so I approach this review with some trepidation and tremendous respect for Greenlaw's work.

"Some Answers Without Questions" is the title of one chapter consisting of a list of Greenlaw's responses to questions she has been asked over her career, but it seems to encapsulate the concerns of the book as a whole, which feels like a series of responses to the questions she would prefer to answer, rather than the inane and reductive questions often put to her (by male interviewers in particular). Greenlaw also challenges many of the labels assigned to her work - again often by men - including "lyrical" and "domestic", and also the three adjectives "cool, intelligent, precise", which she scathingly dismantles: "All poetry should be intelligent and precise but what of this so-called coolness? Is there something about how I comport myself that is not sufficiently friendly? Am I not doing enough to make you comfortable?"

At the heart of the book are the years Greenlaw spent singing in a band and making a record - and her subsequent decision to omit this experience from a previous memoir about music, a silence which she attributes to wanting to "withhold myself rather than risk presence". This silence allows Greenlaw to explore the forces at work that have made it difficult for her and other female writers to speak and be heard, to which she responds passionately and eloquently.

Greenlaw writes in crystalline prose: compact without being dense, epigrammatic without being obscure, startlingly perceptive but also entirely clear. Her own life and experiences provide the through-line for a book which might otherwise risk feeling disjointed, but she also offers illuminating discussion of other writers' lives, including Dickinson, Plath, Gosse and Rilke.

"Some Answers Without Questions" is an incredibly powerful and profound book which deserves to be recognised as a classic of literary criticism and memoir - in many ways the 21st Century's answer to Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own."

Many thanks to NetGalley and Faber & Faber for sending me an ARC to review.