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KNOT
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Reviews of KNOT “The various strands are braided
together with careful, beautiful subtlety. Now we are reading a poem to
Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, George Gascoigne or one of their
contemporaries, like M.W., F.G. or C.M., whose identities we are encouraged
to work out from the initials and internal evidence (here, Mary Wroth, Fulke Grenville and Christopher Marlowe). Now we are
following Ben Jonson on his famous 1618 walk to visit Drummond of Hawthornden. Now we are reading snippets from Greening’s
daily Hawthornden journal. The effect is at times
rather like flipping between the lively chat of Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord
Byron’ and the chiselled shards of Hill’s Mercian
Hymns. The close weaving of “Knot” makes it
hard to suggest its qualities in representative extracts. In the wonderfully
supple poems, the poets are treated as colleagues being brought up to date
since their “golden age”. Sidney is told about “The Herbert franchise,
Pembroke.com”, told that “these are art / because we’ve no idea what art is
any more.” Gascoigne learns that “the poet embroidering in his i-Phoneless
tower will not be / volunteering for Afghanistan or heading off to Gravesend,
like you.” Jonson’s walk becomes “an allegory”, a journey through time before
being greeted at Hawthornden by the poet himself.
In one reader-teasing passage, a bewildered Jonson picks up Lives of the
Poets in a bookshop, can’t find his own name, and none of the other names
seem familiar: “Yalden, Broome, Sprat, Garth, Stepney, Fenton, Hughes…” [...] Knot is a
miniature masterpiece.” Harry Ricketts, The Warwick Review “Knot certainly fits its title.
If you like intertextuality you will relish its
many voices and interwoven twists and turns…There is much to enjoy: a fine
control of language, pithy wit, a strong historical sense. Greening is also
confident and ambitious in his choices of form: as Greening’s notes state,
the masque genre ‘has disappeared completely – unsurprisingly, since masques
were expensive, amateur dramatic indulgences for the nobility’ and he is
honest enough to admit that writing one now risks parody. He pulls it off:
the theme of time allows him some moving contemplation… Knot celebrates
a meeting of minds, that sense of common ground between writers, whether in a
century of masques or today, in a retreat for writers from all over the
world. It questions how poets and poetry can matter and make a difference.”
Pippa Little, Elsewhere: a review of
contemporary poetry “As John Greening tells us in an
introductory note to Knot, in 1618 the forty six year old Ben Jonson
travelled on foot from London to visit William Drummond for a month at Hawthornden Castle in West Lothian before walking all the
way home again. Greening takes this as his historical cue for writing a wonderful
mixture of forms (both poetry and prose) about his own experience of spending
a month at the same Castle on one his writers’ retreats. Sojourns of this
kind may seem more the occasion for writing work that has its genesis
elsewhere than in the writer’s retreat itself, but Greening is exceptionally
deft with the material, marrying past and present in an effective mix that
seeks to return ‘artifice’ to its fully positive Renaissance meaning of
carefully crafted art. Indeed, the chapbook’s title refers back to the ‘knot
gardens’ of the same era, intricately woven in decorative patterns. But there
is nothing purely decorative about the work here. The poet creates an
interesting weave of journal entries on his stay in May 2010, with sonnets,
quatrains and tercets of various kinds addressed to
Jonson’s contemporaries, such as George Gascoigne, Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter
Ralegh and even William Shakespeare. And interwoven into these elegies for a
lost appreciation of beauty and art (so terribly unfashionable!) is a crisp
prose journal that beautifully captures the contemporary scene of life
outside and around the Castle. The whole meditation is rounded off by a
‘Masque of Time’ which the seven Fellows at Hawthornden
put on at the end of their stay and which again contrasts the ‘then’ and
‘now’ of art and artifice.” N.S. Thompson, Stand “Attitudes to poetry in different times
are also considered in John Greening’s Knot. This is an unusual and
original collection in two parts. The first part mixes impressions of Ben
Jonson’s visit to Hawthornden Castle with
Greening’s own reflections on being a Hawthornden
Fellow in May 2010. These prose paragraphs are interspersed with sonnets and
‘verse letters’ addressed to some of Jonson’s contemporaries like George
Gascoigne and Walter Raleigh. The second section is a masque – a stylised dramatic form which is probably unfamiliar to
many contemporary readers but one which at which Jonson excelled…. I have already referred to Knot
as a ‘short’ book; and at 47 pages it probably merits this description. But
with its passages of prose and some fairly long poems the pages do not
feature very much white space and so it is not a book which is short on
content. The first section plays intriguingly with time as the author’s own
twenty-first century thoughts are set alongside facts (and fancies) about
Jonson and his milieu. The poetry in this section is cleverly crafted.
In particular the sonnets skilfully mix a period
feel with modern references…. Greening’s taste for punning…is indulged
more broadly in a contrast drawn between an empty can and a
brimming can’t or in the remark that there is no music in bones
in the glue factory. Only horse voices. Which is surely
a testimony to the inventiveness and energy of this unusual collection.” Thomas Ovans, www.londongrip.co.uk |
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