John Greening, From the East: 60 Huntingdonshire Codices. Renard Press, London, 2024.

John Greening, The Interpretation of Owls, Selected Poems, 1977-2022. Edited by Kevin J. Gardner. Baylor University Press, Waco, Texas, 2023.


If you had to convince a fair-minded sceptic that English poetry is alive and well, and you were allowed only one example to make your case, and it had to be a book published in this country in 2024, a good choice would be John Greening’s From the East: 60 Huntingdonshire Codices.

In the tradition of MacNeice’s Autumn Journal (1938) or his Autumn Sequel (1953), Greening’s poems are rich in daily occurrence: weather, seasons, neighbours, friends, family, animals, history, music, art. And the occurrence is pleasingly particular. So, it is not just the presence of ‘the literary’ but specifically Herbert (poem 2), Blunden (5), Frost (9), old Mr Pepys (10) Sylvia Plath (13) etc. The poems are witty and quietly idiosyncratic, enlivened by everyday surrealism (unicorns for oaks, 15) and worldly objects from the recent past (‘Madeleine Albright’s brooches’, 22) and present (Bitcoin, 19). The poems are mostly written in a vivid and capacious present tense, in a voice which glides between casual, troubled and wondering. This is poet as guide, friend and entertainer. The reader may feel that they are getting to know a place and a person too. There is a sense of being alongside the poet/protagonist, inside his head even, as the mind receives, registers, processes and semi-free-associates. The mental activity, to which the poem directs its ...