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

Please follow this link to a review of Hunts Poems www.saltpublishing.com/horizon/issues/03

Hunts: Poems 1979-2009 consists of highlights from John Greening’s earlier eleven collections, together with about sixty new or uncollected poems.  It includes many of the longer poems from earlier books, together with the complete ‘Hunts’ trilogy of eclogues, elegies and nocturnes written over the last quarter of a century.  It is available from Central Books, the publisher Greenwich Exchange, or from any on-line bookshop such as Amazon.

Glyn Pursglove wrote in Acumen (May 2009) : ‘Since the end of the 1970s, John Greening has steadily established himself a significant presence in contemporary English poetry...Beyond the admirable craftsmanship that characterises almost all of his work, one of Greening’s great strengths is his historical imagination... Greening’s major sequences are splendid examples of the poetry of place, extended reflections upon the individual’s place in his community, upon place as the creator (and creation) of individuals, full of specifics, but never merely parochial... There is much here to enjoy and admire in the work of a serious (but never excessively solemn) poet, who cares about both ‘facts’ and ideas and makes his poetry out of the interpenetration of the two.’

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."

Click here to read an extended review of Iceland Spar (‘Double Vision’ by Alan Gould)  in the October 08 issue of Australian magazine, Quadrant: at www.quadrant.org.au

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.