John Greening

Poets have been inspired by music for centuries, but with the arrival of recordings and the possibility of repeated listening there was an extraordinary upsurge in verse about specific pieces, particular composers. There followed a century of pithy, perceptive responses, fascinating to the poetry lover, delightful to the music lover, and irresistible to those who are both. John Greening's new anthology draws especially on this exciting hoard of forgotten material. ACCOMPANIED VOICES is a unique book: not only is it a highly readable anthology of some of the most memorable and accessible international writing about classical music, and a moving commentary by one set of practising artists on the work of another. It is also something of a guide in verse to the great composers. There have been several anthologies of 'music poems', but never one which follows the story of western music through from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century, a fact which gives John Greening's 250-pages an encyclopaedic value. This is in effect a chronological guide to the major composers of the last four hundred years, written in the language which comes closest to music itself - poetry. Readers unaccustomed to poetry anthologies will find in ACCOMPANIED VOICES the same pleasure that they might find in simply putting on a CD and listening. Every page brings something to arrest or transport and an there is extraordinary diversity of response. Ancedote, epiphany, portrait, meditation... but many of these poets offer intellectual insights too and even critiques - there is far more variety here than any straightforward music essay can manage. But readers who feel that they do not know enough about classical music will find that these poems, while informing them, move beyond the mere names of composers and their works, reaching for more universal concerns. . JOHN GREENING is a poet and received a Cholmondeley Award in 2008. He is also a Hawthornden Fellow and a Fellow of the English Association. He has published studies of the Poets of the First World War, Yeats, Hardy, Edward Thomas and Elizabethan Love Poets.

Poets on Composers, from Thomas Tallis to Arvo Pärt

Accompanied Voices

In the controversy surrounding his marriage to Sylvia Plath, we should not forget Ted Hughes' monumental status in the latter decades of the 20th Century. From his early glances at nature's savagery, through the shadow-years of 'Crow', into a middle way full of birds, flowers, insects, farm-life and fishing, to the sudden, unexpected panorama of 'Birthday Letters', Hughes never ceased to astonish his readers. John Greening, author of the Greenwich Exchange Guides to Poets of the First World War and W.B. Yeats (writers much loved by Ted Hughes), offers a straightforward guide through the labyrinth of his 'Collected Poems', while making an assessment of the poet's reputation nearly a decade after his death.

The Poetry of Ted Hughes

'Greenwich Exchange' books are written by men and women who bring to their topic not only a passionate interest but also a critical intelligence. These books provide an analytical and historical overview to students and stand as lively and engaging works of art in their own right.

The Poetry of W.B. Yeats

Penelope Shuttle

Heath

Kevin Gardner

As a genre of poetry, the country house poem was born in the seventeenth century. As English country house society itself grew in prominence, the poem of commemoration diminished in popularity; not until the Edwardian era, when the country house as an institution began to wane, was there a renewed interest in country house poetry. As the power and influence of landed society dwindled, the country house began to haunt the English literary imagination, and our poets found in its dereliction a frequent subject and theme. This is the first book to gather modern and contemporary country house poems into one collection. Poets representing a diversity of class, race, gender, and generation offer a wide variety of perspectives: stately exteriors and interiors, crumbling ruins, gardens both wild and cultivated, and the voices of noble owners, servants, and curious visitors. The dominant note sounded is perhaps unsurprisingly elegiac, yet comic, satiric, and gothic tones appear frequently as well. The common thread is that, in response to the rapid sociological changes of the twentieth century, poets reflect on the country house as an architecturally, politically, socially, and economically potent symbol and institution, both in its heyday and in its eclipse.

An Anthology of Modern Country House Poems

Hollow Palaces

The long title poem of John Greening’s The Silence is a meditation on Jean Sibelius and the thirty years he spent grappling with an eighth symphony, which in the end he probably burned. The poem is emblematic of a broader concern with the mystery of the creative process, explored here in the work of other artists but also grappled with first-hand, in the composition of poems. The collection is haunted by other kinds of silence too, especially that most emphatic one (notably in Greening’s witty formal verse letter, ‘Airmail for Chief Seattle’ and an Egyptian sequence based on wall paintings in the British Museum), but at the same time it is open to the bright potentiality of the unknown, the beyond. A tribute to the late Dennis O’Driscoll is a bold meditation on hope, a mood intensified in a series of uplifting Hölderlin translations. Elsewhere, Greening visits the Peak District, Brecklands, chalklands and a lost world of highwaymen and mythology beneath the runways of Heathrow, tuning in to the special music of each place. Along the way are striking individual poems on trees, penny coins, Hilliard miniatures, a coal bunker, a totem pole, the X5 bus route and musical migrating geese.

The Silence

Thomas Hardy's reputation as a poet is higher now than it has ever been. It is generally agreed that the Poems of 1912-13, written in memory of his first wife, are some of the greatest elegies in the language. This invaluable new study concentrates on the 'Emma Poems', setting them in the context of Hardy's troubled first marriage, then analysing them one by one. John Greening - a poet himself and author of the Greenwich Exchange Guides to Poets of the First World War and W.B. Yeats - highlights the distinctive music of this twenty-one poem 'suite', while exploring the sexual and spiritual tensions concealed witihn Hardy's Dorsetshire and North Cornish landscapes.

John Greening

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