John Greening (born 20 March 1954 in Chiswick, London) is an English poet, critic, playwright and teacher. He has published more than twenty poetry collections large and small, including To the War Poets (2013) and The Silence (2019), both from Carcanet Press, and The Interpretation of Owls: Selected Poems, 1977–2022 (2023), from Baylor University 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 (Boydell and Brewer, 2015), Hollow Palaces: An Anthology of Modern Country House Poems (Liverpool University Press, 2021), and Contraflow: Lines of Englishness, 1922–2022 (Renard Press, 2023), the latter two co-edited with Kevin Gardner. 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).
Background 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. degree.John Greening, Newcastle University Special Collections and Archives. He married Jane Woodland in 1978.
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.Crime of the Century: The Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax 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.John Greening biography at Carcanet Press.
Poetry publications 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.Hippopotamus Press, at Open Library. Over the past forty-plus years, he has published more than twenty volumes of poetry, including two full Carcanet Press collections, To the War Poets (2013) and The SilenceFringe Review UK, 2019. (2019), the latter featuring his long poem about Jean Sibelius. Earlier books include his 1991 Bloodaxe collection, The Tutankhamun Variations,Tim Dooley, "Poet on the Margins", TLS, 20 December 1991; Ian McMillan, "Long Odds for Laureate", Poetry Review 82.1 (Spring 1992). the more pastoral sequences of Fotheringhay and Other Poems,Rodney Pybus, "Poetry Chronicle", Stand 37.3 (Summer 1996). The Coastal PathPeter McDonald, "Past Places", Poetry Quarterly Review (Winter 1996). and The Bocase Stone, then in 1998 a first "Selected" – NightflightsR. V. Bailey, Envoi, 2000. – and two long poems: Gascoigne’s Egg and Omm Sety,Matthew Jarvis, "Shoestring Poetry", English: The Journal of the English Association 52.203 (Summer 2003), pp. 175–180. both of which showed a growing interest in the occult. The substantial collection The Home KeyPaul Groves, "Home Ground", London Magazine (2004). appeared in 2003, followed in 2008 by Iceland SparAlan Gould, "Double Vision", Quadrant 7 October 2008. (the result of a pilgrimage to Akureyri, sponsored by the Society of Authors). These were followed by a more substantial "Selected" – Hunts: Poems 1979–2009Neil Powell, "Hunting Ground", PN Review 190 (November–December 2009).Emily Grosholz, "Echoes of Romanticism", Hudson Review 64.2 (Summer 2011), pp. 341–351. – and the chapbook KnotPippa Little, "How Poets and Poetry Can Matter", Elsewhere: A Review of Contemporary Poetry (2013). (2013). In 2016, there was a Heathrow collaboration with Penelope Shuttle, Heath.Review of Heath by Penelope Shuttle and John Greening. A further collaboration, consisting of thirty-five years' holiday sonnets exchanged with Stuart Henson, a Postcard to, appeared in 2020. Other recent volumes include Achill Island TagebuchReview of Achill Island Tagebuch by John Greening (2018), Europa’s Flight (2019), Moments MusicauxDavid Malcolm, Poetry Salzburg Review 35 (Summer 2020) (2020), The Giddings (2021), Omniscience (2022), The Interpretation of Owls: Selected Poems (2023, edited by Kevin Gardner), and From the East: Sixty Huntingdonshire Codices (2024). The long poem Cleopatra-Antony will be published as a pamphlet by Dare-Gale Press in summer 2026 and details of a further full collection, Crowning, will appear soon.
His translations from the German include poems of Goethe, Nightwalker’s Song (Arc Publications, 2022) and the complete two volumes of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Neue Gedichte/New Poems (to be published by Baylor University Press in late 2025 to mark the 150th anniversary of Rilke’s birth).
Other writings His memoir of life in Egypt, written in prose and verse, Threading a Dream: A Poet on the Nile,Dawn Wood, Review of Threading a Dream: A Poet on the Nile by John Greening, Dundee University Review of the Arts (2018). was published by Gatehouse Press in 2017.
He has been a reviewer for journals such as Poetry Review, London Magazine, Hudson Review and the Times Literary Supplement.Selection of Greening's essays at Muck Rack His collected reviews and essays, Vapour Trails (Shoestring Press), was released in 2020. In May 2025, Renard Press will bring out Greening’s large format illustrated guide to poetry – a series of linked essays and poems, A High Calling, or Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?
Other books include 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).John Greening's books at Greenwich Exchange
His editorial projects include an expanded, illustrated edition of Edmund Blunden's WW1 memoir Undertones of War,Robyn Marsack, "Going Over the Ground", PN Review 230 (July–.August 2016). as well as editions of the poetry of U. A. Fanthorpe (Not My Best Side, with an introduction by A. E. Stallings, Baylor University Press, 2024), Iain Crichton Smith (Deer on the High Hills, Carcanet, 2021), and Geoffrey Grigson (Selected Poems, Greenwich Exchange, 2017).Review of Selected Poems by Geoffrey Grigson edited John Greening His edition of Matthew Arnold’s poetry, True to One Another, appears from Renard Press in March 2025.
His anthologies include Accompanied Voices: Poets on Composers from Thomas Tallis to Arvo Pärt (Boydell & Brewer, 2015),Review of Accompanied Voices: Poets on Composers, ed John Greening Hollow Palaces: An Anthology of Modern Country House Poems, with Kevin Gardner (Liverpool University Press, 2021),Review of Hollow Palaces and launch at Kimbolton and Contraflow: Lines of Englishness 1922–2022, also with Kevin Gardner (Renard Press, 2023). He has collaborated with composers Roderick Williams, Cecilia McDowall, Ben Parry, David Gibbs, and Philip Lancaster.
Criticism and reviews 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."
On To the War Poets, Denis Joe writes in Manchester Salon: "Too many poets, since [the world wars], seem intent on trying to capture an idea of 'what it was like'.... So it is refreshing to come across this volume of poems from John Greening. None of the poems in this volume make any pretence in attempting to capture some sort of feeling of the war, as one critic put it: 'These are not poems as history lessons.' There is no faux rage about the slaughter of so many men, instead Greening takes us on a journey through the century still recovering from the upheaval of that war.... Greening realises that there is no need for dramatics to put across the feel of war; in this sense he displays a great deal of respect for his audience: allowing them to respond to his poetry in their own way and at their own time. In doing so he captures the humanity of the war poets, who, in their own way, also rejected hysteria in regards to their own work, and in many ways gave a feeling of ordinariness to their experience of the war.... [To the War Poets] is a volume of contemporary poetry in the truest sense that I hope will be read in many years to come, alongside the works of the War Poets."Denis Joe, Manchester Salon, December 2014.
On The Silence, David Malcolm writes in Poetry Salzburg Review: "John Greening’s The Silence is a fine collection of verse – coherent and yet varied, constantly fresh and insightful, often deeply moving, deploying a language that is as vibrant as its vision of the world. It is a collection to return to frequently, in order to immerse oneself in its richness, its darkness, and its felicity of voice."Poetry Salzburg Review 35 (Summer 2020) Frank Beck writes in Manhattan Review, "It's a loving and inventive meditation on the sources of creative inspiration; the vagaries of artistic confidence; and the ability of the mind to keep observing, associating and struggling to build connections, even when those connections unravel, again and again."Frank Beck, "John Greening, Poetry and Anthology", The Manhattan Review, 2020. Kevin Gardner writes in PN Review of the long poem about Sibelius: "The Silence is a compelling exploration of the pressure of fame and the burden of creativity. It is, moreover, an affecting and exquisite poem. The structure sets order at odds with chaos: formal quatrains work in counterpoint against lines of variable syllabic count, while a steady slant-rhyme scheme is disrupted by an adroit use of enjambment."Kevin Gardner, "A Bunch of Keys", PN Review 249 (September–October 2019).