Poetry in Herons: John Greening

Poetry in Herons returns!

For our March monthly poetry reading, we are delighted to welcome John Greening.

Free entry. Come for the poetry. Stay for the poetry.

Arrive at 5pm. We’ll offer you something fizzy. Usually a drink but perhaps one day it will be a sherbet fountain.

5.10-5.40ish, we’ll enjoy some poetry.

5.40-6pm, finish the fizzy things, chat with the poet and perhaps buy their books.

Some seating. Some standing. Get in touch with us about any requirements you may have.

It is free and unticketed but it would help if you let us know that you are coming. RSVP to read@heronbooks.co.uk.

John Greening is a poet, critic, editor and translator, a Bridport, Arvon and Cholmondeley winner and author of over twenty collections, The Interpretation of Owls: Selected Poems 1977-2022 (Baylor UP ed. Gardner) came out in 2023. He has edited Matthew Arnold, Geoffrey Grigson, Edmund Blunden, Iain Crichton Smith and a new U.A.Fanthorpe, plus several critical studies and anthologies, most recently (with Kevin Gardner) Contraflow: Lines of Englishness, a Guardian and Sunday Times Book of the Year. His Goethe translations appeared in 2022 from Arc and there is a forthcoming Rilke.

U.A.Fanthorpe (1929-2009) was one of the UK’s most popular poets, but it’s not well known that her writing career began in Bristol. She had given up her teaching post and become what she liked to call  ‘a middle-aged drop-out’. While working as a hospital receptionist in the 1970s she began writing (literally in her lunch hours) the work that would soon make her famous in ways very rare for any poet. Her many awards included the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

There has not been a new selection of her poems available for many years and John Greening will be introducing his annotated edition of her work tonight and also reading some of his own poetry.