|
Hunts: Poems 1979-2009 gathers together highlights from John
Greening’s eleven books along with about sixty new or
uncollected
poems. At its heart is the poet’s extraordinary Huntingdonshire
trilogy, but the ‘hunts’ of the title range from
Ancient Egypt to New
Jersey, from Hounslow Heath to the South Pole. This collection
–
quite different in emphasis from his 1998 ‘Selected’
and excluding
only Iceland Spar (2008) – restores many out-of-print
sequences and
narratives, such as the Captain Scott epic, The Winter Journey,
and
Gascoigne’s Egg, about the R101 airship disaster. Omm
Sety, the true
story of an Englishwoman who believed she was the reincarnated
lover
of Pharaoh Sety I, appears alongside extracts from all Greening’s
Egyptian books. Hunts also reprints The Coastal Path, which
Ted
Hughes and Seamus Heaney made a top prize-winner in the Arvon/
Observer competition, together with the complete Fotheringhay,
another Arvon prize-winner. |
“Greening revels in other voices, other speech patterns
... The
formal control is excellent and the ability to get inside
the heads
of dead men enviable.”
- Ian McMillan on The Tutankhamun Variations (1991) in Poetry
Review
“There is hope for civilised, contemporary reflection
in our time
with the publication of a book like Fotheringhay ... no one
who has a
real interest in important poetry should miss reading
‘Huntingdonshire Eclogues’”
- William Oxley on Fotheringhay and Other Poems (1995) in
Acumen
“Greening’s most sustained and ambitious undertaking
so far, the
‘Huntingdonshire Eclogues’... are wonderfully
and cumulatively
evocative precisely because the gathering of detail, as jackdaw-like
as ever, is here so convincingly grounded in an inhabited
landscape ... in a way in which Crabbe or Hardy would have
perfectly
appreciated.”
- Neil Powell on Nightflights (1998) in The Times Literary
Supplement
|
| John Greening was born in 1954. He received
a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2008. Greenwich
Exchange publish his studies of the First World War Poets, W.B.Yeats,
Ted Hughes, Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas. |
Cover Art Carry Akroyd: Flight
Cover Design Jake Campbell |
| |
| |
|
