From the East

By /

October 2026

About Shuffling the Shelves →

Publishing as an industry is obsessed with new – books yet to come out… but what about the brilliant books that have already been published? Each month we spotlight a different author whose book was published more than a year ago, which you might be yet to meet…

This month we hear from John Greening about the brilliant From the East…

Attention!

It was D.H.Lawrence who defined poetry as an act of attention — and even as I write that sentence I recall how just yesterday I picked up his novel, The White Peacock, and then just couldn’t be bothered. Attention is somehow more and more difficult to muster. Yet it’s precisely that which should work in favour of the poem-as-choice-of-reading-matter, because compared with fiction there’s considerably less of it (assuming you avoid Paradise Lost and The Faerie Queen) although that ‘less’ does require a certain ‘more’ — more concentrated attention than we give most things. For those who actually write poetry or want to write it, the stuff is all around us and there for the taking if we allow ourselves the time and have prepared ourselves. The trouble is we are often just too busy to notice.

I deliberately haven’t mentioned social media, because concentration has always been hard to come by. That’s why poets learn to be patient, waiting and waiting, sometimes until long after their names are overgrown and forgotten. Then one day, someone, a Professor Herbert J.C. Grierson perhaps at the very beginning of the twentieth century up in Aberdeen, dusts off those ancient editions of John Donne and other so-called metaphysical poets … and finds the time to give them his attention. Or it might even happen more quickly, as when someone influential in America realises that the unknown Amy Clampitt, though already well into her sixties, is in fact a major poet and publishes The Kingfisher to extraordinary acclaim in 1983. Or, more recently still, Roger Lonsdale (having published his landmark Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century English Verse) calmly points out — chaps, there are in fact just as many fine women writing poetry in that era as there are men. And he produces a stunning sequel to prove it.

Not that any of us who call ourselves poets actually write for posterity. In fact, I’m not always sure who it is I write for. But the Huntingdonshire Codices in From the East were definitely done to please myself. Not only was I indulging my love of English lore and landscape, taking my mind for a winter walk at noon, but this time (there had been three previous Hunts sequences and there’s a pending fifth) I had also allowed myself to be openly literary. An allusion here, a snatch of bio there.  If they were puzzling as well as bookish, that’s why they’re called Codices, whose etymology is from the word for ‘book’.  Never mind those reviewers who’d say Greening’s late work smells of the oil-lamp — books, writers and writing are as much a part of my everyday life as the fens, floods and ice storms, trees, fields, and hedges, toads, kites and muntjacs that pervade From the East.  I think we’re over that 1950s rant by Kingsley Amis about no one wanting any more poems about other poets. Poets talk to each other, as they always have done, use each other’s material, parody, imitate (none of which is plagiarism), exchange epistles and satires, answer each other across the years — as when Amis’s friend Philip Larkin composes “Sad Steps”, taking a phrase from Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet to the moon for his title.

Most importantly, these poems were all about paying attention. That was something that started back in the 1980s when my Huntingdonshire Eclogues were almost like verse journals, focusing on details of the locality, ‘a song about what is near’ as Swedish Nobel winner Tomas Tranströmer once put it.  He was an influence, but so was reading Seamus Heaney’s essay Englands of the Mind… and so was Ted Hughes. I remember a reading Hughes gave in Hammersmith where he introduced poems from Moortown and apologised, saying they weren’t really poems. He later retitled the book Moortown Diary. But they were undoubtedly poems and some of his best. I believe those early long-lined studies of mine were poems too. Forty years on, I’ve tautened my act up a good deal, but that same rule applies if you want to write poetry or to read it: Look! Look again!

– John Greening, 21 October 2026

From the East

John Greening

Add to basket

In over twenty poetry collections since 1982, John Greening has explored subjects as varied as Egypt, Captain Scott, WWI, classical music, Ben Jonson and Heathrow airport, but he has kept returning to the landscape of a quintessentially English (and technically non-existent) county. His well-received Huntingdonshire Eclogues of the late 1980s were followed a decade later by Huntingdonshire Nocturnes and, another ten more years after that, the Huntingdonshire Elegies.

On a cold Boxing Day walk in 2017, while the ferocious storm, the ‘Beast from the East’ prowled the land, his Huntingdonshire Codices began to come together, and what had been a trilogy turned into a quartet.

Formed of sixty fifteen-line stanzas, this haunting and consistently entertaining collection can be read like a journal, tracking lines of thought through time and space, painting detailed, witty and moving pictures of a countryside and life that lie unchanged, even through periods of great upheaval – political, ecological and cultural.

Shopping Cart
Scroll to Top