John Greening and Friends

To celebrate the release of his new memoir with photos and original poetry, A High Calling, or, Where Do You Get Your Ideas From? Navigating Poetry with John Greening, John is joined by friends and fellow poets Stuart Henson, Hilary Davies, Penelope Shuttle and Dana Gioia for an evening of lively discussion, literary talk – and poetry.

A High Calling

Large (Royal) flapped paperback • Contains 80 black and white pictures

224pp • ISBN: 9781804471494

£14.99

Buy now → (secure free UK postage and signed bookplate with coupon code 'freepostcalling')

Sharing what he’s learnt during half a century’s creative work, John Greening gives us an insight into the life of a poet, playwright, editor, reviewer, teacher and performer. Eminently readable, amusing and informative, A High Calling is a rich resource for anyone with an interest in good writing.

Navigating a wide-ranging career, including a spell as a children’s magician and a time at the BBC with musicologist Hans Keller, as well as years spent living in Upper Egypt, we are taken on a journey around the globe and through time and literature. With an extraordinary cast of poets, including correspondence with Ted Hughes and a meeting with Seamus Heaney at Little Gidding, Greening paints a compelling portrait of the lives behind the writers we meet.

Rich in anecdote and literary insight and interwoven with autobiographical sketches and original poems, A High Calling is anything but lofty in its approach, and is chock-full with down-to-earth advice for readers and writers.

About the poets

Hilary Davies is a poet, critic and translator, former Chair of the Poetry Society and an Eric Gregory Award Winner. She has taught widely (notably as Head of Languages at St Paul’s Girls’ School) and edited several distinguished literary magazines, including Argo in Oxford for twelve years – a magazine which published at least two of tonight’s other poets. She has held fellowships at Hawthornden, the British Library, the English Association, the Temenos Academy and (for the RLF) at King’s College. In 2023 she was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year Award. Following four collections from Enitharmon, her new book, Compass Light, is published by Renard.

Dana Gioia is from Los Angeles (the focus of Meet Me at the Lighthouse (2023)) and a former Poet Laureate of California who began his career in the business world. As well as publishing six distinguished collections and the brilliantly controversial Can Poetry Matter? (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), he has frequently collaborated with musicians and last year published a study of opera and poetry: Weep, Shudder, Die. He was Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and has received numerous medals and awards. He can be heard on BBC Radio 4 Extra - Poetry Extra, In The Studio - Dana Gioia: Poet Laureate of California

John Greening is a Bridport, Arvon and Cholmondeley Award winner with over twenty collections, including one last year from Renard: From the East. Along with several critical books and anthologies, he has produced editions of Geoffrey Grigson, Edmund Blunden, Iain Crichton Smith and U.A.Fanthorpe. For Renard he has just edited a Matthew Arnold and last year he prepared the anthology Contraflow: Lines of Englishness with Kevin Gardner who also edited The Interpretation of Owls: Selected Poems 1977-2022 for Baylor UP. There is a Rilke New Poems from Baylor this autumn.

Stuart Henson received an Eric Gregory Award early on and his first few collections were published by Peterloo, who also brought out Dana Gioia’s. More recently, along with plays, short stories and a children’s picture book, there have been publications large and small from Shoestring: in 2022 Beautiful Monsters and this year the haiku sequence, A Handful of Wasps, one of several collaborations with award-winning artist Bill Sanderson. He also collaborated with John Greening on a Post Card to, a sequence of shared sonnets on postcards. His poetry has been anthologised in several best-selling anthologies and his stage adaptations of John Steinbeck and Iain Serraillier have been performed both here and abroad.

Penelope Shuttle lives in Cornwall, which is often the focus of her poems, although her 2016 collaboration with John Greening, Heath, was set near Heathrow. As well as a string of full collections and pamphlets since 1981, there have also been novels and a much reprinted study of menstruation, The Wise Wound (written with her late husband, Peter Redgrove). Apart from her many highly praised Oxford University Press volumes, there was one from Carcanet and in recent years Bloodaxe. Foremost among these are the extraordinary elegies of Redgrove’s Wife, shortlisted for the Forward and T.S.Eliot Prize. Another Bloodaxe collection, History of the Child, is due in February.