|
|
Poetry |
|
|
|
New and Recent Poetry Collections: click on the book covers below to read reviews |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
The High Window Reviews | The High Window (thehighwindowpress.com) |
The Interpretation of Owls This new Selected Poems appeared from Baylor University Press in March 2023. Although John Greening’s Carcanet collections are available in the USA, this is his first American publication – an elegant 400-page hardback representing the work of forty-five years, chosen by Kevin Gardner in consultation with the poet. The selection is available in the UK and the price has been kept down to just over £20. For British readers it can be ordered here: The Interpretation of Owls by John Greening (eurospanbookstore.com)). The selection is arranged thematically, and represents over twenty books along with much that has never been collected, as well as some entirely new poems. There are introductions by both editor and poet and an in-depth interview with Greening, putting his work in a contemporary context for new readers. More details: “To enter the expansive lines and many-angled sequences of John Greening’s poetry is to be engaged in the best of conversations, with a voice whose easy depth of knowledge and breadth of reference is always rooted in attention to immediate experience—a voice that also, generously, listens. Its invitation to the reader is to inhabit, truly, each of its particular places, whatever the country, culture, or historical moment—and so, by extension, the world. Nowhere has the sheer range of Greening’s work been better displayed than in this rich selection.” —Philip Gross, Professor Emeritus, University of South Wales “For some four decades, John Greening has been a centering figure in the poetic landscape of Britain: a poet whose unbounded curiosity has taken him through the wide (and often conflicted) world with a passion for details that root his work in place. He finds, in a broad range of settings and circumstances, a language adequate to his emotions. Like Auden, he seeks out memorable language in a variety of poetic forms. I hope this marvelous selection brings a grateful audience to his splendid, moving, spiritually adept, and always provocative work.” —Jay Parini, author of New and Collected Poems: 1975–2015 |
|||
 |
From the East John Greening writes about the 60 Huntingdonshire Codices that make up From the East: “In the late 1980s I began writing thirty-two ‘Huntingdonshire Eclogues’ (published later in Fotheringhay and Other Poems) about day-to-day life in a county which had ceased to exist in 1974. These were unusually long-lined poems, all in tercets, each one just fitting on a page. They were followed ten years later by ‘Huntingdonshire Nocturnes’ (see The Home Key), more of a twilit summer sequence. This time there were forty-two poems in tercets, but of different lengths, with a six-beat line (still unrhymed). Another decade on, with the publication of Hunts: Poems 1979-2009, I wanted to bring the sequences together by adding a shorter group of new, rather autumnal ‘Huntingdonshire Elegies’, now introducing some rhyme. That seemed to be that. But then – before the pandemic – what looked like a trilogy became a ‘Huntingdonshire Quartet’. My ‘Codices’ were begun during a walk on Boxing Day 2017, and continued to emerge as the ‘Beast from the East’ prowled the land. That wintriness is evident here. The 64th poem was composed on my 64th birthday in March (I later removed four). They are all of fifteen lines, loyal as ever to the tercet, and that long six-beat line remains, but now I am using a regular (if not always full) rhyme. Why ‘Codices’? Perhaps because I am being more than usually literary. Winter, after all, is a time to hunker down and read.” |
|||
|
Omniscience Omniscience takes its title from a long playful sequence about aspects of science. Beginning with a memory of a school talk about the planet Mars and a tribute to SF writer Arthur C.Clarke, the book examines Darwin, Bunsen burners, Alchemy and includes a sequence of poems about Sir Isaac Newton. John Greening reads an extract here: |
|||
|
Nightwalker's Song |
|||
|
The Giddings An unnamed traveller is distracted from his business trip in Eastern England by a sign ‘To the Giddings’. He sets off walking through the Huntingdonshire landscape, with its Civil War associations and modern military bases, past wind turbines and fragments of ancient woodland, the trees providing a commentary in a variety of verse forms – lyrical, sardonic, admonitory. But it turns out that he is also walking through time and, after a powerful encounter with Nicholas Ferrar in 17th-century Little Gidding, towards a mysterious metamorphosis. Although The Giddings is recognisably in the tradition of Pilgrim’s Progress, it owes something to Gaudete, that extraordinary book by Ferrar’s descendant, Ted Hughes. Interweaving prose and verse, John Greening’s ‘cantefable’ continues the sequence of long dream poems he began twenty years ago with Gascoigne’s Egg and Omm Sety, then developed in Knot (2013) and his recent Carcanet collection, The Silence. |
|||
 |
a Post Card to Stuart Henson and John Greening first began exchanging sonnets from their various travels back in 1985 when postcards were the only way to send someone a picture greeting. Why sonnets? Perhaps because they can pack a lot into a few words, and there’s only so much space on a postcard. But the habit caught on and continued well into the age of Instagram and WhatsApp. Now that holidays have become rather more difficult, the two poets felt it was time to gather their poems into this entertaining new collection so that even locked-down readers can journey with them in imagination. Many are light-hearted, as might be expected, and feature seascapes or tourist sights or some local curiosity; but a surprising number look beneath the surface to ask more serious questions. These postcards take us from the coasts of East Anglia, Wales and Western Ireland, to Brooklyn Heights and Winnipeg, from Edinburgh and Manchester to Paris, Bruges, the Rhine Valley, Finland and Iceland. We visit Van Gogh’s grave, Maggi Hambling’s Scallop, Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave, Henry Williamson’s cottage, Lady Anne Clifford’s castle, Elgar’s Malvern and Tennyson’s Somersby. We encounter a good few famous writers and other ghostly figures from the past, along with paintings and standing stones, an inscription at Puddletown, a churchyard in Conwy, half a bridge at Avignon, a sundial in Bologna, returning again and again to Italy – Siena, Florence, Venice, Verona, Rome. A remarkably inventive collection of “postcard” sonnets chronicling the travels of two lifelong friends. These snapshots are by turns witty, touching, and enlightening – and always engaging. Kevin Gardner, Baylor University Available from https://www.redsquirrelpress.com/catalogue
|
|||
 |
Moments Musicaux John Greening introduces Moments Musicaux: I have been writing about music on and off since the 1970s, and most of my books of poetry have musical elements, but recently there seems to have been something of a crescendo or accelerando. In 2015, I edited the anthology Accompanied Voices: Poets on Composers from Thomas Tallis to Arvo Pärt (Boydell Press), then shortly afterwards found myself starting my own long poem about the last thirty years of Jean Sibelius and his legendary creative silence. This appeared in 2019 from Carcanet. But there were many uncollected music poems which hadn’t quite fitted into individual volumes, and I felt that they might work together as a small collection. Just before The Silence came out, my wife and I made a pilgrimage to Salzburg – to honour Mozart, of course, but Trakl too – and it was probably during our visit that Moments Musicaux began to take shape. While there are some more demanding pieces, there are a good few divertissements here too, along with snatches of autobiography and homages to musicians who have been important to me. This has also been an opportunity to print one or two pieces commissioned by composers or performers over the last decade. Roderick Williams
Penelope Shuttle Available from Poetry Salzburg at http://poetrysalzburg.com/moments.htm John reads a poem from the collection:
|
|||
 |
Europa's Flight John Greening began his fifteen sonnet sequence during a flight to Crete, thinking it would be an exploration of the island’s mythology. As tends to happen with myths, they took on a life of their own, making unexpected connections, and touching on matters of profound contemporary significance. ‘Europa’s Flight’ proved, in fact, to be an oblique commentary on Brexit. In this fittingly labyrinthine new poem (a ‘crown of sonnets’) each last line becomes a first line and all fourteen are then combined to make up the final sonnet. Martyn Crucefix writes: The poet’s role is always to recover connection and, in Europa’s Flight, John Greening fills his crown of sonnets (a form which is itself a celebration of connectedness) with astounding combinations and varieties of subject and object. Travelling across contemporary Europe, he confronts borders and that which cannot be confined by borders. So here are Brexit, the refugee crisis, personal instances of love and loss, the topography of the Mediterranean and the colourful, violent myths of Crete. This little book is both a tour de force of the poetic craft and a triumph of the poetic imagination. Available from New Walk Editions for £5 or as part of a subscription to their series
|
|||
|
The Silence The Silence begins and ends with Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), perhaps the best known contemporary composer of his day, famously ‘silent’ for thirty years, and constantly pestered for an eighth symphony. But this collection touches on several other kinds of silence, not least the ultimate one and the luminous possibility of something beyond: a tribute to the late Dennis O’Driscoll is a bold meditation on this possibility. Egypt is where Greening’s poetry began (as described in his 2017 memoir, Threading a Dream: a Poet on the Nile) and the sequence ‘Nebamun’s Tomb’ is here reprinted from a much praised 2016 Rack Press pamphlet. It describes an extraordinary series of tomb-paintings in the British Museum. There are extracts too from Heath, John Greening’s 2016 collaboration with Penelope Shuttle, poems which tune in to the mysteries and magic behind the noise of Heathrow, the area where the poet spent his youth. A version of Hölderlin’s classic, Homecoming, is transposed to Hounslow Heath, and Greening sends a verse letter to Chief Seattle (‘There is no death, only a change of worlds’) from on board a flight to the Pacific North-West. The Silence also visits the Peak District and England’s chalk landscapes, drawing out their mystical and visionary details, and several poems take us to the flatlands of Eastern England with which this poet is particularly associated. Along the way are poems about trees, a totem pole, penny coins, a coal bunker, Hilliard miniatures, the X5 bus route and migrating geese. The final third of the book consists of a single long poem exploring the creative process (the composer’s’s but also the poet’s) and the tensions at play in Sibelius’s life as he looks back over his seven great symphonies, and struggles to produce an eighth in the forests of Järvenpää. The Silence was launched in July 2019 with performances by the Dryad String Quartet. Simon Jenner reviewed the occasion: The quartet play Sibelius at https://twitter.com/i/status/1150176718403067904 Read John’s essay about the European aspects of his new book here: A review of The Silence by Alwyn Marriage in London Grip: In two articles for the Carcanet blog, John talks about the influence of Sibelius on his work the origins of his long poem, ‘The Silence’ -
John can be heard reading an extract from the poem at Sibelius’s home north of Helsinki here: Order a copy from Carcanet
|
|||
 |
Achill Island Tagebuch For two weeks in the summer of 2018, I was artist in residence at the Heinrich Böll Cottage in Dugort, Achill Island. I didn’t quite know what I was going to write, although by way of preparation I had bought myself a new edition of Yeats and was revisiting some of the Böll stories that I had studied for A-Level almost half a century ago. As it happened, I began to write a sequence of sonnets, a form I have loved since I taught myself the form by writing 36 sonnets, one a day (each a different kind) to tell the story of ‘The Winter Journey’ undertaken by some of Captain Scott’s men. That was in 1981/2. It was probably about the same time that I last corresponded with the teacher, Jack Stevenson, who introduced me to Heinrich Böll’s work, and who certainly had no idea that I was sitting at Böll’s desk as he sent me an email that first morning in Dugort. I opened it in astonishment. He had come across a sonnet of mine in The Spectator a week or two before, which was in memory of my good friend Dennis O’Driscoll, and he decided to get in touch. It was a promising start to my stay, and it made a natural subject for my first sonnet – which also features an even more unnerving encounter during my first night in the cottage. Order a copy from Redfoxpress
|
|||
|
Selected Poems of Geoffrey Grigson (ed. John Greening) Geoffrey Grigson (1905-1985) was for many years a vital figure in the literary life of Britain. A notoriously unsparing reviewer, he edited the magazine New Verse (which brought Auden and other writers of the 1930s to prominence) and found popularity with his writings about the countryside and several wonderful anthologies. For much of his life he was writing his own poetry too, but it was only when he was in his sixties that it attracted much attention, and since his death it has largely been overlooked. This new Selected Poems ranges from his debut 1939 collection and the work of the 1940s and 1950s (long unavailable) through to the award-winning late volumes and the very last poem he wrote, in September 1985. Love lyrics, satires, landscapes, sketches of rural life, autobiographical pieces - these poems sharp, economical, by turnhave a freshness and clarity of focus rare among contemporary poets. They also amount to a fully rounded portrait of this controversial Cornishman: a seventh son, who lost all six brothers before he was middle-aged; who was married three times (finally to the cookery writer, Jane Grigson); who rubbed shoulders with the famous poets and artists of his day; who was quintessentially English, yet devoted to France and the idea of Europe; who lived through two world wars and many more purely literary feuds.Now the smoke has had time to clear, what remains is Geoffrey Grigson's poetry - by turns lyrical or barbed, restlessly attentive to the physical world, its delights and its terrors. http://www.greenex.co.uk/ge_record_detail.asp?ID=177 Review of Grigson’s Selected Poems by Martyn Crucefix: Review in the Times Literary Supplement: Review in Winter 2018 issue of The High Window:
|
|||
 |
Threading a Dream: a Poet on the Nile Threading a Dream is a journey in prose and verse to southernmost Egypt, that 'Black Land' where the dead were known as 'Westerners'. In 1979, the Greenings went to live in Aswan for two years. Newly married, childless, ready for adventure, they were prepared (with a smattering of colloquial Arabic) to thread the country’s mysteries, its contradictions, troubles, and delights, its sights and synchronicities. It was an extraordinary place, a unique time, and as this memoir describes, it was where the poet began to find a voice. In this new memoir, poems from thirty-five years, notably from Westerners (1982), are interwoven with prose chapters exploring the light and dark of life in Upper Egypt during the last days of Sadat. There are also snippets from plays, along with extracts from The Tutankhamun Variations and other Egypt-themed volumes such as Omm Sety The story of Threading a Dream picks up several unexpected threads. Some are uncanny, even mystical, and more than a few are political, but in the end this is a memoir is about one English writer’s personal Arab Spring. ‘Greening is a disarming and engaging guide ... I enjoyed Threading a Dream a great deal’ (Andrew Hadfield, PN Review). ‘Inspiring, enlightening and educational ... a wealth of detail and anecdote, recounted with humour and insight’ (Dawn Wood, DURA) The memoir features illustrations by Rosie Greening
Threading a Dream is available from Gatehouse Press at the link below, £10.
|
|||
|
|
|
||
|
|
 |
Heath – published in June 2016 by Nine Arches ( http://www.ninearchespress.com/) – is a collaboration with the eminent poet Penelope Shuttle (http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/category/penelope-shuttle). John and Penelope were brought up on opposite sides of what was once the most dangerous ten square miles in England, Hounslow Heath – now Heathrow Airport. In the introduction to this substantial work, John writes:
"I have written many times about my Hounslow childhood: those weird groans and howls that would rise at night from beyond the hawthorn hedge at the bottom of our garden, when engines were being tested; the nightflights coming uncomfortably near to our chimney as I lay in bed (the roof was later ripped off by the vortex from one that came too close). The rhythm of life near Heathrow meant that conversations and even lessons at school had to pause for the planes. I loved them, of course, and adored the airport, where I would play on the lifts and the fruit machines. I was even vaguely aware of the significance of Heston—where we used to go for the swings or a haircut—as the place where Mr Chamberlain returned from Munich waving his piece of paper. Penny and I had often reminisced about the area. But it was only on a visit to Falmouth in February 2014, where I had been reading from To the War Poets, with poems such as 'Heath Row' and 'Middlesex', that her own new preoccupation with London became clear. Indeed, her 2014 chapbook, In the Snowy Air, is something of a love song to the city. I think it may have been my suggestion, but anyway the subject came up after my reading: we should collaborate on something about the Heath... I went back to Cambridgeshire and started writing: the first three poems, which are as they now appear in the book (and as they were published in PN Review), and which carry at least some sense of the two of us setting out on an unknown journey, not without memories of Macbeth and Banquo making their own heathen way. That was it. And there really was a feeling that this was something new, untried, just out of reach: exactly the right conditions for satisfactory poetry. Soon Penny was responding. And very quickly we were picking up on each other's obsessions, even if we never quite abandoned our own preferred styles: mine a longer, denser line, Penny's shorter, freer, with her characteristic light touch. Before long there was collaboration at a deeper level, with Cornwall's 'As if' being answered by East Anglia's 'If as', for example, and the echoing of one poem by another meant that the sequence began to take shape as a book. By the end, we were even rewriting each other's verses and at least two of the poems here are co-written. It was an invigorating experience, although not unique: in 1988, Philip Gross and Sylvia Kantaris had produced something rich and strange in The Air-Mines of Mistila, for example, and that was certainly at the back of my mind, one of several literary milestones that reassured me we were not entirely lost, that we would emerge safely on the far side – as we have."
Click here to learn about upcoming public readings.
|
|
|
 |
Edward Blunden’s Undertones of War Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) was one of the youngest of the war poets, enlisting straight from school to find himself in some of the Western Front’s most notorious hot-spots. His prose memoir, written in a rich, allusive vein, full of anecdote and human interest, is unique for its quiet authority and for the potency of its dream-like narrative. Once we accept the archaic conventions and catch the tone – which can be by turns horrifying or hilarious – Undertones of War gradually reveals itself as a masterpiece. It is clear why it has remained in print since it first appeared in 1928. This new edition not only offers the original unrevised version of the prose narrative, written at white heat when Blunden was teaching in Japan and had no access to his notes, but provides a great deal of supplementary material never before gathered together. Blunden’s ‘Preliminary’ expresses the lifelong compulsion he felt ‘to go over the ground again’ and for half a century he prepared new prefaces, added annotations. All those prefaces and a wide selection of his commentaries are included here – marginalia from friends’ first editions, remarks in letters, extracts from later essays and a substantial part of his war diary. John Greening has provided a scholarly introduction discussing the bibliographical and historical background, and brings his poet’s eye to a much expanded (and more representative) selection of Blunden’s war poetry. For the first time we can see the poet Blunden as the major figure he was. For the first time, too, Undertones has an index and the chapters are given clear headings, events placed within the chronology of the war. Blunden had always hoped for a properly illustrated edition of the work, and kept a folder full of possible pictures. The editor, with the Blunden family’s help, has selected some of the best of them . For further information, visit: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198716617.do
John Greening and Margi Blunden discuss the war poet’s work on Cambridge 105 radio: http://cambridge105.fm/book-night-09-01-2016/
|
|||
|
|
To order please follow this link |
The poems in this pamphlet were written after visiting the British Museum to see their newly revived Egyptian collection, in particular the paintings from the tomb of an accountant called Nebamun. These remarkable works of art, dating from around 1350 BC, were 'removed' and sold to the museum by the British consul-general in Egypt, Henry Salt (1780–1827), a keen and well-placed collector of antiquities. My own interest in Egypt began rather later, between 1979 and 1981, when my wife and I were volunteer teachers in Aswan, an experience which resulted in Westerners (Hippopotamus Press, 1982), my first collection.
Sally Evans, reviewing Nebamun's Tomb and the Rack Press pamphlets https://keeppoemsalivereviews.wordpress.com/2016/01/
‘Simply designed with modest runs of 150 copies, they are a good buy at £5 each and perhaps buyers will trust Rack Press enough to buy them all. Then they’ll find they have favourites. Mine (of these 4) is John Greening’s Nebamun’s Tomb. Perhaps this is hard on the others because John Greening is easily the most considerable and most published of these writers. He has (in the credits) the best publications list and awards list and the least extravagant claims from supporters. Additionally his work here has a theme, which is somewhere we are definitely going in poetry. His poems are highly re-readable. They don’t tell you enough, but get you interested in old Salt and the Egyptian relics in the British Museum. It’s a sequence of 11 shortish, vari-form and image-filled poems, linking London and Egypt. It is, imo, the best title and has the best subject matter of the four.’
Available from http://rackpress.blogspot.co.uk/
|
|
|
|
|
To order please follow this link |
ACCOMPANIED VOICES is a unique book: not only is it a highly readable anthology of some of the most memorable and accessible international writing about classical music, and a moving commentary by one set of practising artists on the work of another. It is also something of a chronological guide to the great composers, following the story of western music in the language which comes closest to music itself – poetry. Readers unaccustomed to poetry anthologies will find in ACCOMPANIED VOICES the same pleasure that they might find in simply putting on a CD and listening. Every page brings something unexpected or illuminating, funny or heartbreaking. Here we begin to realise just how much Ted Hughes or R.S.Thomas took from Beethoven, or what Bach meant to First World War veteran Ivor Gurney or Holocaust survivor Lotte Kramer. We meet poets who have long been exploring classical music (Peter Porter, John Fuller) or are musicians themselves (Fiona Sampson, Gwen Harwood). We hear Ronald Duncan on Britten, George Mackay Brown on Peter Maxwell Davies. But there is Norman Nicholson on Grieg, too, Jo Shapcott on Schoenberg, Dannie Abse on Wagner; the poetry of a former Archbishop as well as that of a former Poet Laureate. Poet and music lover John Greening adds a substantial introduction and detailed notes on the work of well over a hundred distinguished poets and their subjects. Further details:
|
|
|
|
|
 To order please follow this link |
‘Knot is a miniature masterpiece’ (Warwick Review) - KNOT Review
|
|
|
To order please follow this link |
In November 2013, John Greening’s major collection To the War Poets appeared from OxfordPoets (Carcanet):
http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781906188085 As we approach the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, a modern poet 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. 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. http://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=9178 http://www.manchestersalon.org.uk/to-the-war-poets-by-john-greening.html John can be heard talking about the war poetry written by German soldiers in this interview at King’s Place (given just before Poet in the City’s WW1 commemoration in 2014 in which John read with Sir Andrew Motion, Stephen Romer, Sasha Dugdale and others): Click here
|
|||
List of earlier 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
|
||||
 |
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.
Please follow this link to a review of Hunts Poems www.saltpublishing.com/horizon/issues/03 |
|||
| To order please follow this link | ||||
| Earlier
poetry collections, including Nightflights (New
and Selected poems): please click here
|
||||
 |
ICELAND SPAR (2008, Shoestring
Press)
John Greening writes: "ICELAND
SPARfocuses 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
|
|||
| To order follow this link | ||||
 |
The Home Key (2003, Shoestring
Press)
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).
|
|||
| To order follow this link | ||||
 |
Omm Sety (2001, Shoestring
Press, Limited Edition)
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.
|
|||
| To order follow this link | ||||
CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS OF ALL EIGHT EARLIER POETRY COLLECTIONS
|
||||
|
|
|
||
|
At the start of 2016 John led a well-received discussion on the T.S.Eliot Prize shortlist at London’s Southbank Centre: these are the transcripts of his ten mini-talks: |
|
||
