From the East E-Book

John Greening

• Herausgeber: Renard Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 45

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

In over twenty poetry collections since 1982, John Greening has explored subjects as varied as Egypt, Captain Scott, WWI, classical music, Ben Jonson and Heathrow airport, but he has kept returning to the landscape of a quintessentially English (and technically non-existent) county. His well-received Huntingdonshire Eclogues of the late 1980s were followed a decade later by Huntingdonshire Nocturnes and, another ten more years after that, the Huntingdonshire Elegies. On a cold Boxing Day walk in 2017, while the ferocious storm, the 'Beast from the East' prowled the land, his Huntingdonshire Codices began to come together, and what had been a trilogy turned into a quartet. Formed of sixty fifteen-line stanzas, this haunting and consistently entertaining collection can be read like a journal, tracking lines of thought through time and space, painting detailed, witty and moving pictures of a countryside and life that lie unchanged, even through periods of great upheaval – political, ecological and cultural.

Leseprobe

from the east

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From the East first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2024

Text © John Greening, 2024

Cover design by Will Dady

John Greening asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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From the East

60 Huntingdonshire Codices

john greening

renard press

author’s note

In his excellent book, Poetry, David Constantine asks, ‘Why should a local habitation interest anyone but the locals?’ Answering his own question, he explains how a poet must ‘convert the personal, anecdotal, and accidental into the figurative’ and find the ‘allegory’ of their life. This is essentially what I have been doing since the late 1980s, when 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, composed in a kind of loose hexameter. The form owed much to the new freedom offered up by an Amstrad word processor. They were followed ten years later by ‘Huntingdonshire Nocturnes’ (The Home Key, 2003), more of a summer sequence, chiefly lit by moon and stars. This time there were forty-two poems in tercets, but of different lengths, more tautly composed 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 in 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.

john greening

March 2024, Stonely

from the east

for Katie and Rosie

1

Following power lines, three of them, insulators

like gleaming mini angels, a trio of undecorated

Christmas trees, brown, on poles as upright as

memorial crosses. Boxing Day. The hunt is ready

to pass under the wires, but at this hour nobody

hails my shadow stretching itself across a muddy

sown field beside that single cottage, where once

an old woman offered a smile. Following lines,

their gifts of light and heat, to a chain-link fence

around the gas pumping station: the North Sea

cries Stop. Let the powerful march and be

hailed by a singing distant host in white. My energy

reserves are not so great. I turn to face the future

where I’ve come from: and it’s wireless. Human nature

finds its way, king or shepherd, poet or teacher.

2

‘Who made the eyes?’ The question Herbert put

in God’s mouth, whether expecting an answer or not,

before we looked down at the web in our hands and were caught.

We know a man who’d know, perhaps, who lives with a maze

on the misty edge of vision. Has he threaded the eyes’

mysterious centre? He would offer the name of a disease

for you to Google. I, says Nature. I, says God,

and Herbert up at Leighton says he has seen weird

visions over Little Gidding. A sky of blood.

A cloud like a cross. Just make sure you look

at what’s there under your nose. Famous for its lack

of any sight worth seeing, yet a walk

over this airfield to study the light on the new furrows,

the bars of brightness through hawthorn, the drifting arrows

of geese, the needlepoint turbines, has its glories.

3

That stone again, London 62 Miles,

reminds me of the Huntingdonshire man for whom it spells

Samarkand, who drove a cartload of Brussels

down the main road once, then back to plough

his old furrow. What does London know?

And why should a man not be tired of it by now?

No, Johnson, you keep out of this. That stone

on the B645 has more to tell us than

your dictionary, which I refute thus. Have done

with capitals, and think of the lower case out here

where garden, friends, TV and family are fair

exchange for all that vanity. Park the car,

unlock the door. Yes, things could be worse,