Poetry of Migration: Addressing the Unknown?
Lucia Windsor Room, Newnham College
Friday 10 November 2023, 5.15 – 6.30 pm
Hosted by the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement
Dr Kevin Gardner introduces poet John Greening whose work he has edited for Baylor University Press. They will discuss his writings and translations and the way John’s own travels have prompted poems about displacement. John will read from The Interpretation of Owls: Selected Poems 1977-2022 and his edition of the Lewis poet, Iain Crichton Smith as well as from his collaboration with Kevin Gardner on a new anthology about Englishness.
John Greening is author of over twenty collections of poetry, most recently The Interpretation of Owls, Poems 1977-2022 (Baylor UP, 2023, ed. Kevin Gardner). He has edited Edmund Blunden's memoir, Undertones of War, the poetry of Geoffrey Grigson, Iain Crichton Smith and U.A.Fanthorpe, as well as several anthologies, notably Hollow Palaces, a collection of modern country house poems, and this autumn Contraflow: Lines of Englishness 1922-2022, both with Kevin Gardner. A selection of his Goethe translations, Nightwalker's Song, was published last year and he has just finished translating the two volumes of Rilke’s New Poems. Recipient of the Bridport and TLS Centenary prizes and a Cholmondeley Award, he has taught in Upper Egypt, Scotland and New Jersey, and for many years has lived with his family in Kimbolton, Cambridgeshire, where he taught English. He was RLF Writing Fellow at Newnham 2015-17.
Kevin Gardner is Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He received his BA from the University of St. Thomas in Houston, his MA from the College of William and Mary, and his PhD from Tulane University. He is a specialist in British literature of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. He has edited several volumes of the poetry and prose of John Betjeman and an anthology of church elegies, Building Jerusalem. With John Greening, he has co-edited a collection of modern country house poems, Hollow Palaces and Contraflow: Lines of Englishness 1922-2022.