"The Silence" by John Greening (Carcanet, 2019)

Poems from The Hudson Review, London Magazine, Magma, PN Review, The Spectator, Stand, TLS, etc. Over 110 pages of poetry in various shapes and sizes.

I've never been gripped by his work. I'm aware that I'm baised - I don't trust prolific poets or collaborations (which he's done in the past). Many of his pieces seem to me to have a long-poem aesthetic even when they're short. "Evensong" is 2 pages long, so maybe that's a long poem, but the preceding poem "Kew" is much shorter with the same pacing. Of course he can tighten up ("Bunker", the poem after "Evensong", has this first stanza - "A space of pouring/ darkness, the rush/ of a time crushed") but by the end of the book my (yes, unfair) impression is that I've done a lot of wading. "Two Roads" and "X5" for example seemed too relaxed to merit line-breaks. Lines like "without one church spire to contradict the horizontal" (p.21) use language that's so slightly elevated that I find it counter-productive.

"Chalk" has its moments. It mentions Royston Cave, which isn't far from me. It has less prosey interjections like "Pick up the cue, apply/ the small red cube:/ take aim, and/ split the prism to a pack of eyes" - an allusion to snooker/pool (my cubes are blue), but why a pack of eyes? I'd understand it if the pack were split into eyes

"Airmail for Chief Seattle" has the feel of a classy poem, the sort I have trouble getting excited about. It comprises 20 aaabbb sestets. "Compleat" has a prose plot, delivered in prose with line-breaks. "The Silence" is a long poems in loose abba stanzas.

Other reviews

• Alwyn Marriage (Among the shorter delights in this collection, I would recommend “Compleat”, in which Greening describes a fishing trip in minute detail, “Woden”, and “Tree Rings")
• Frank Beck (He keeps things moving– and the reader engaged – with lines of varying lengths, arranged in quatrains that often spill over into the next, and rhyme and assonance that come and go, as the sought-for inspiration drifts in and out of focus. ... The title poem is accompanied by 27 shorter poems and three adaptations of poems by Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). Three of these thirty poems are especially appealing. “Nebamun’s Tomb” ... “Tree Rings (To Katie at 30)” ... “After Hölderlin: To the Fates”)