The Interpretation of Owls: Selected Poems, 1977-2022 - Hardcover

Greening, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1481317342 ISBN 13: 9781481317344

Publisher: Baylor University Press, 2023

Synopsis

The Interpretation of Owls is a representative selection of one of the UK's most prolific and respected poets. Edited by Kevin Gardner in consultation with John Greening himself, this first American collection showcases highlights of a remarkable forty-year poetic journey, displaying extraordinary variety and technical skill.

The contents (arranged thematically to illustrate Greening's abiding interests and influences) comprise more than 250 poems chosen from twenty individual collections published between 1982 and the present. Kevin Gardner has also made a welcome selection of previously uncollected and unpublished work. Readers of John Greening's accessible and musical lines will find themselves transported from America to England to Iceland to Ireland, with a long stay in Egypt and brief stopovers in several other countries.

Passing from the present to the ancient world and back, these poems reimagine historical figures, look inward at the poetic self, and explore the very meaning of home. This outward journeying through time and space is reinforced by a constant questing for spiritual meaning--reminiscent of T. S. Eliot, whose influence on Greening has been profound. Though we are unlikely to find him wrestling with angels, Greening is nevertheless constantly hoping for revelation, attuned to the numinous, treating creation as sacred, and ready to find a world of spirituality in history, myth, or even a lump of East Anglian clay.

The Interpretation of Owls features an author's preface, an editor's introduction, two indexes, and for readers who want to experience the work in its order of original publication, a chronological table of contents. Additionally, there is an invaluable new interview with the poet in which he discusses with the editor the background to some of the works.

About this title

About the Author

John Greening was born in London in 1954 and studied at the universities of Swansea, Exeter, and Mannheim (Germany). He has taught for much of his life, and he and his wife settled in Cambridgeshire where their two daughters were born, and where they have remained. Since Westerners in 1982, Greening has published more than twenty collections of poetry, including two from Carcanet, To the War Poets (2013) and The Silence (2019), as well as a series of recent pamphlets: Achill Island Tagebuch (2019), Europa’s Flight (2019), Moments Musicaux (2020), The Giddings (2021), a Post Card to (with Stuart Henson, 2021) and Omniscience (2022). He was until recently Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. He has won the Bridport Prize, the Arvon Prize, the TLS Centenary Prize and in 2018 received a Cholmondeley Award from the UK Society of Authors for services to poetry.

Edition details

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1481317342
• ISBN 13: 9781481317344
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 310
• Editor: Gardner Kevin J