The Interpretation of Owls

For some four decades, John Greening has been a centering figure in the poetic landscape of Britain: a poet whose unbounded curiosity has taken him through the wide (and often conflicted) world with a passion for details that root his work in place. He finds, in a broad range of settings and circumstances, a language adequate to his emotions. Like Auden, he seeks out memorable language in a variety of poetic forms. I hope this marvelous selection brings a grateful audience to his splendid, moving, spiritually adept, and always provocative work.

~Jay Parini, author of  New and Collected Poems: 1975–2015

John Greening’s welcome and timely publication, The Interpretation of Owls: Selected Poems, is full of riches, of shaped and compelling poems drawn from a deep well of lived experience. Greening is a man with his own voice, and at ease with it. This volume demonstrates to great effect the formation and fruition of his staunch lyricism, wit, wryly observant eye, and keen ear. His poems shine with the grace of perception, the clarity of lovely realised purpose. Their innate sophistication and respect for spiritual matters further commend these poems to any reader of contemporary poetry.

~Penelope Shuttle, Poet and Novelist

To enter the expansive lines and many-angled sequences of John Greening’s poetry is to be engaged in the best of conversations, with a voice whose easy depth of knowledge and breadth of reference is always rooted in attention to immediate experience—a voice that also, generously, listens. Its invitation to the reader is to inhabit, truly, each of its particular places, whatever the country, culture, or historical moment—and so, by extension, the world. Nowhere has the sheer range of Greening’s work been better displayed than in this rich selection.

~Philip Gross, Professor Emeritus, University of South Wales

Edited in consultation with the poet, this first American collection presents a poetic journey of more than forty years, and it is exceedingly well-travelled.

~John Forth, London Grip

Undoubtedly, this is a Greening cornucopia and a treasure trove for the reader who wants to dip and browse.

~Kathleen McPhilemy, The High Window