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The Silence
The long title poem of John Greening's The Silence is a meditation on Jean Sibelius and the thirty years he spent grappling with an eighth symphony, which in the end he probably burned. The poem is emblematic of a broader concern with the mystery of the creative process, explored here in the work of other artists but also grappled with first-hand, in the composition of poems. The collection is haunted by other kinds of silence too, especially that most emphatic one (notably in Greening's witty formal verse letter, 'Airmail for Chief Seattle' and an Egyptian sequence based on wall paintings in the British Museum), but at the same time it is open to the bright potentiality of the unknown, the ...
Omniscience
John Greening's remarkable Omniscience takes its title from a long playful sequence at the core of this work. Rhetorically stunning, emotionally charged, and meticulously constructed, Omniscience makes perfect, profound sense.
The Giddings
A businessman distracted by a road sign goes walking in Huntingdonshire - military bases, wind turbines and ancient woodland. Trees talk to him in verse. He travels in time to a transformatory encounter with Nicholas Ferrar in Little Gidding.
To the War Poets
In To the War Poets John Greening sends dispatches across the decades. In a sequence of verse letters he addresses the poets of the First World War directly, making connections yet always aware of distance: 'No larks, / just the passing of traffic.' Greening 'explores Englishness', but also, in his translations from German poets, goes beyond it. From the discovery of the Sutton Hoo burial in 1939 to the security forces' shut-down of Heathrow airport in 2006, the presence or threat of conflict underlies Greening's precise, unsentimental writing.
From the East
In over twenty poetry collections since 1982, John Greening has explored subjects as varied as Egypt, Captain Scott, WWI, classical music, Ben Jonson and Heathrow airport, but he has kept returning to the landscape of a quintessentially English (and technically non-existent) county. His well-received Huntingdonshire Eclogues of the late 1980s were followed a decade later by Huntingdonshire Nocturnes and, another ten more years after that, the Huntingdonshire Elegies. On a cold Boxing Day walk in 2017, while the ferocious storm, the 'Beast from the East' prowled the land, his Huntingdonshire Codices began to come together, and what had been a trilogy turned into a quartet. Formed of sixty fif...
A Family Story
Tracing one's own family history is a compelling exercise that often throws up unexpected connections. In this book, Michael Greening traces his surname story as far back as the sixteenth century, including some of the branches that moved to the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. He also explains the association with Sir Edward Elgar.
Greening of Capitalism
As China, India, and other industrializing giants grow, they are confronted with an inconvenient truth: They cannot rely on the conventions of capitalism as we know them today. Western industrialism has achieved miracles, promoting unprecedented levels of prosperity and raising hundreds of millions out of poverty. Yet, if allowed to proceed unencumbered, this paradigm will do irreversible harm to the planet. By necessity, a new approach to environmentally conscious development is already emerging in the East, with China leading the way. Positioning its argument against zero-growth advocates and free-market environmentalists, Greening of Capitalism charts this transformation and sketches out ...
Hollow Palaces
As a genre of poetry, the country house poem was born in the seventeenth century. As English country house society itself grew in prominence, the poem of commemoration diminished in popularity; not until the Edwardian era, when the country house as an institution began to wane, was there a renewed interest in country house poetry. As the power and influence of landed society dwindled, the country house began to haunt the English literary imagination, and our poets found in its dereliction a frequent subject and theme. This is the first book to gather modern and contemporary country house poems into one collection. Poets representing a diversity of class, race, gender, and generation offer a ...
Deer on the High Hills
Growing up on the Isle of Lewis, Iain Crichton Smith spoke only Gaelic until he was five. But at school in Bayble and then Stornoway, everything had to be in English. Like many islanders before and since, his culture is divided: two languages, two histories entailing exile, a central theme of his poetry. His divided perspective sharply delineates the tyranny of history and religion, of the cramped life of small communities; it gives him a tender eye for the struggle of women and men in a world defined by denials. Deer on the High Hills: Selected Poems includes forty years' work and proves that big themes - love, history, power, submission, death - can be addressed without the foil of irony and acquire resonance when given a local habitation and a voice that risks pure, impassioned speech. Editor John Greening provides indexes, a preface and an essay on the life and work of this important poet.
