As the title suggests, Crowning, by British poet John Greening, represents the culmination of a life’s work that includes more than twenty full collections. These new poems (following his 2023 Baylor Selected, The Interpretation of Owls, edited by Kevin J. Gardner), are sometimes free, sometimes formal, but always musical and take us into previously unexplored spiritual territory. Yet this is a collection full of wit and playfulness. The short title poem recalls the birth of a granddaughter while King Charles III’s coronation was taking place. Another describes the experience of having a dental crown fitted. There is even a ‘corona’ of sonnets and a sequence of poems about circles. As well as some longer poems such as ‘Empire’, a candid examination of the British colonial legacy, Crowning includes several entire sequences: a series of epigrams on immortality, an Irish sonnet journal set near Yeats country, a group of acrostics about the paintings of Constable, and an arrangement of roses selected from the author’s garden in Cambridgeshire. There is also a series of Christmas poems, notably one modelled on Milton’s ‘Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ (there are several tributes to famous writers here, as well as translations of Goethe and Rilke) and a group of pieces on Italy and Ancient Rome. As has been the case since his 1982 debut collection, Westerners, John Greening returns to his beloved Egypt. But he delights in America too, and there are four poems written after a visit to Waco. Several poems to his daughters and a final sequence prompted by themes from friends show that, above all, this poet is concerned with the search for love and meaning in a fractured world.
