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Forthcoming books, articles, poems, workshops and readings. Further
details are on John Greening’s Facebook page.
TO THE
WAR POETS
In June
2013, John Greening’s collection To the War Poets will appear
from Oxford Poets (Carcanet):
As we approach the centenary
of the outbreak of the First World War, John Greening sends
dispatches across the decades, hoping to catch strains of a
forgotten Englishness – but offering an alternative perspective
too, in his translations from Heym, Trakl, Stadler, Stramm. His
verse letters to the war poets are interwoven with other pieces in
which the sounds of conflict are never far away: the Sutton Hoo ship
burial is discovered weeks before the Second World War, Heathrow is
shut down by security forces in 2006. A childhood of planes and
trains and bicycles is haunted by gibbet and blitz and holocaust.
There are troubled echoes of Empire (Egypt and Zanzibar, personally
significant places for the poet); and amid the gentle landscapes of
middle England there is still a distant rumbling: the pacifist Waldo
Williams trapped in war-time Huntingdonshire, Glenn Miller’s final
concert in a Bedfordshire village.
Details will appear on
www.carcanet.co.uk
Preview
of other books:
John
Greening’s sequence of Elizabethan verse letters, KNOT, is also
forthcoming. This was written while at Hawthornden writers’ retreat.
Extracts will be appearing in The Hudson Review and Warwick
Review.
ACCOMPANIED VOICES: POETS ON COMPOSERS FROM WILLIAM BYRD TO ARVO PART
This
anthology will be the first gathering for many years of contemporary
poetry about classical music. With the rise of the ‘gramophone’,
twentieth-century poets began to write more and more about their
favourite composers and their responses to them. From Ted Hughes to
Carol Rumens, poets have often been moved by the Great Masters to
produce some of their best work. Details to follow.
Threading a Dream: a Poet on
the Nile
A prose
memoir of two years spent in Upper Egypt (written in 2011).
“Threading a Dream (a Poet on the Nile)
is the memoir of an obsession, dating from two years my wife and I spent
teaching in Upper Egypt from 1979-81, at the very end of Sadat’s rule.
With the fall of Mubarak thirty years later, I found myself thinking
again about the intervening years, and how, although I have never
returned to Aswan, in some sense I have never stopped returning. This is
not a travel book, nor is it autobiography as such, but a study of the
‘growth of a poet’s mind’ through a series of recollections,
meditations, descriptions, anecdotes on aspects of Egypt ancient and
modern. The book’s structure resembles that used by Paul Farley and
Michael Symmons Roberts in Edgelands, where each chapter heading
sets a theme for improvisation, but what is distinctive in the 70,000
words of Threading a Dream is that its twenty-nine chapters
include six letters, two short stories, a play synopsis, and around
forty poems selected from the dozen collections I have published since
my early Egypt-themed books, Westerners (Hippoptamus Press, 1982)
and The Tutankhamun Variations (Bloodaxe Books, 1991). These can
be experienced as musical interludes, moments of intensity or light
relief to accompany the prose, with its action, description and
psychological exploration; but I hope that much of the interest – even
to those who would not read a poetry collection – will come from seeing
how a poem emerges from a particular time and place.”
Preview
of articles
Following
John Greening’s survey of recent pamphlets for the Times Literary
Supplement (still available to view at the TLS website), several
other reviews of poetry collections and books about music are pending. A
review of Roger Garfitt’s memoir The Horseman’s Word, will
appear in Country Life. Other reviews and articles are
forthcoming from Agenda, PN Review and Warwick Review.
Preview
of poems
Two poems
will appear shortly in The Spectator. Also there are poems due
to appear in London Magazine and English. Two new poems
will appear in the American journal Hudson Review. John’s
collection HUNTS is to be reviewed there too.
A poem
about Charles Dickens will be included in an anthology to celebrate the
novelist’s work, A MUTUAL FRIEND, edited by Peter Robinson.
Readings and Workshops
John Greening is reading at the Leicester Poetry Society on Friday 13th
April 2012.
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