John Greening (poet)

Greening received the Alexandria International Poetry Prize in 1981 and the Scottish Arts Council Award. Greening was one of the top six of the Observer Poetry Prize in 1987. He has won the Bridport Prize and the TLS Centenary Prize, and he received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. He is the recipient of two Hawthornden Castle fellowships and a Fulbright teaching fellowship. Greening has been one of the judges for the Eric Gregory Award. His poem "Sibelius" was chosen by Carol Rumens as her "Poem of the week" in The Guardian, 4 January 2021.

Other books include a memoir, in prose and verse, of life in Egypt, Threading a Dream: A Poet on the Nile, as well as guides to poetry (Poetry Masterclass) and to poets (Elizabethan Love Poets, W. B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, the First World War Poets, and Ted Hughes). Greening has been a reviewer for journals such as Poetry Review, London Magazine, Hudson Review and the Times Literary Supplement. His collected reviews and essays, Vapour Trails, was released in 2020. His editorial projects include an expanded, illustrated edition of Edmund Blunden's WW1 memoir Undertones of War as well as editions of the poetry of Iain Crichton Smith (Deer on the High Hills, forthcoming 2021 from Carcanet) and Geoffrey Grigson (Selected Poems, Greenwich Exchange, 2017). His anthologies include Accompanied Voices: Poets on Composers from Thomas Tallis to Arvo Pärt (Boydell & Brewer, 2015), Ten Poems about Sheds (Candlestick, 2018), and the forthcoming Hollow Palaces (a selection of modern country-house poems, with Kevin Gardner, Liverpool University Press, 2021). He has collaborated with composers Roderick Williams, Cecilia McDowall, Ben Parry (musician), David Gibbs, and Philip Lancaster.

He has written a series of plays, one of which, about Robert Louis Stevenson, was awarded Best New Play at the Edinburgh Festival. Another, about the Lindbergh kidnapping, was premiered in Asheville, North Carolina in 2002. Others he has staged with young people while teaching at Kimbolton School, and he took a one-man play about Gordon of Khartoum to the Edinburgh Fringe in 1984. He corresponded about his early verse plays with Ronald Duncan and with Ted Hughes. His first play was staged in Exeter – about Robert Schumann.

Greening has taught for much of his life, including two years with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) in Aswan, Upper Egypt. Shortly before leaving in 1981, he was awarded the Alexandria International Poetry Prize and received the medal and papyrus certificate from Jehan Sadat on the site of the ancient Pharos. In 1983, after some time teaching Vietnamese boat people in northeastern Scotland, he and Jane moved to Kimbolton, Cambridgeshire (originally Huntingdonshire) where they have lived ever since – apart from a year on a Fulbright exchange in New Jersey 1990-91 – and where their two daughters were born. Greening taught for many years at Kimbolton School and established a poetry reading series at Kimbolton Castle. He has tutored all ages for the Indian King Arts Centre in Camelford, Cornwall, for the Arvon Foundation and currently for the Poetry School in Cambridge, where he was until recently RLF Writing Fellow at Newnham College.

Greening’s first poems were published in Emma Tennant’s Bananas, and his earliest Egyptian-themed poems appeared in Poetry Review. In the early 1980s, he received a Scottish Arts Council Award while living in Arbroath. His first collection was published in 1982. He has published over twenty collections, most recently the pamphlets Achill Island Tagebuch, Europa’s Flight, Moments Musicaux (Poetry Salzburg, 2020) and the two full Carcanet Press collections, To the War Poets (2013) and The Silence (2019), the latter featuring his long poem about Jean Sibelius. Earlier books include his 1991 Bloodaxe collection, The Tutankhamun Variations, the more pastoral sequences of Fotheringhay and Other Poems, The Coastal Path and The Bocase Stone, then in 1998 a first "Selected" – Nightflights – and two long poems: Gascoigne’s Egg (Cargo Press, 2000) and Omm Sety, both of which showed a growing interest in the occult. The substantial collection The Home Key appeared in 2003, followed in 2008 by Iceland Spar (the result of a pilgrimage to Akureyri, sponsored by the Society of Authors). These were followed by a more substantial "Selected" – Hunts: Poems 1979-2009 – and the chapbook Knot In 2016, there was a Heathrow collaboration with Penelope Shuttle, Heath A further collaboration, consisting of thirty-five years’ holiday sonnets exchanged with Stuart Henson, a Postcard to, appeared in December 2020, while his pamphlet The Giddings appeared in March 2021. The Interpretation of Owls: Selected Poems is forthcoming from Baylor University Press.

Of Hunts: Poems 1979-2009, Glyn Pursglove writes in the poetry magazine Acumen, "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."

John Greening was born in Chiswick and brought up in Kew and Hounslow. He attended Wellington Primary School and Isleworth Grammar School. Greening studied English Literature at Swansea University. He won a studentship to the University of Mannheim in Germany and then spent a year at the University of Exeter, where he wrote a dissertation on verse drama for his M.A. He married Jane Woodland in 1978.

John Greening (born 20 March 1954 in Chiswick, London) is an English poet, critic, playwright and teacher. He has published over twenty poetry collections large and small, including To the War Poets (2013) and The Silence (2019), both from Carcanet Press. He has edited a major illustrated edition of Edmund Blunden’s war memoir, Undertones of War, for Oxford University Press and produced editions of poetry by Geoffrey Grigson and Iain Crichton Smith. His anthologies include Accompanied Voices: Poets on Composers from Thomas Tallis to Arvo Pärt and Hollow Palaces (selected modern country house poems co-edited with Kevin Gardner for Liverpool University Press, 2021). He has reviewed poetry for the Times Literary Supplement since the 1990s. His collected reviews and essays, Vapour Trails (Shoestring Press), appeared late in 2020. He is a recipient of the Alexandria International Poetry Prize (1981), the Bridport Prize (1998), the TLS Centenary Prize (2001) and a Cholmondeley Award (2008).