List of collections:

To read reviews of The Home Key or Omm Sety please click on book cover

or for information about earlier collections please click here

Earlier poetry collections, including Nightflights (New and Selected poems): please click here

 John Greening writes: "ICELAND SPAR focuses entirely on Iceland rather in the way that my first collection was solely about Egypt.  The deserts of this book are those of the lava-plains, but also the emotional aridity of a teenage Second World War RAF recruit, stranded in Akureyri a long way from his girlfriend back in London, enduring the Blitz.  The recruit is my father, who spent much of the war as a wireless operator in Iceland; the girlfriend is my mother.  But many of these poems are a response to the landscape of Iceland during my first visit there in 2001, following a generous grant from the Society of Authors.  I tried to track down the site of my father’s wireless hut and rekindled an enthusiasm for Old Norse (which I studied at university) and the mythology of the Northmen. The book includes a version of one of the Edda, ‘Voluspa’ (published in Modern Poetry in Translation) a vision of the end of the world, which I finished just a few days before 9/11 and consequently found myself rereading with an entirely new and contemporary slant."

John Greening’s tenth collection, The Home Key, includes the Bridport prize poem, a sequence commissioned by the Eden Project and a song cycle performed at the Wigmore Hall.

‘Musical, spatial and geographical in its suggestiveness...here is an eye that sees the incandescent wonder of the world’ (Acumen). ‘Rich and rewarding writing’ (Eddie Wainwright in Envoi).

 ‘A worthy Bridport winner’ (London Magazine).

Omm Sety is a narrative poem, which tells the true story of Englishwoman Dorothy Eady, who believed that in a former life she had been the mistress of Pharaoh Sety 1.  This dramatic poem weaves the voices of Eady and Sety with memories of the poet's own years in Egypt during a period when Omm Sety was still living in the temple at Abydos.