In To the War Poets John Greening sends dispatches across the decades. In a sequence of verse letters he addresses the poets of the First World War directly, making connections yet always aware of distance: ‘No larks, / just the passing of traffic.’ Greening explores ‘Englishness’, but also, in his translations from German poets, goes beyond it. From the discovery of the Sutton Hoo burial in 1939 to the security forces’ shut-down of Heathrow airport in 2006, the presence or threat of conflict underlies Greening’s precise, unsentimental writing.

War (Georg Heym)

On the Eastern Front (Georg Trakl)

Pleasure in Form (Ernst Stadler)

In Despair (August Stramm)

To August Stramm, Georg Trakl, Ernst Stadler, Georg Heym (Langemark)

The Train

To Isaac Rosenberg (Dover)

The Island, A to Z

To Wilfrid Gibson (The Menin Gate)

The Hope Valley Line

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To John McCrae (Essex Farm, Yser Canal)

To Robert Nichols (France)

Feast Day, Melchbourne

To Edmund Blunden (Ypres)

Reading John Clare on New Year’s Eve

Causeway

To Laurence Binyon (Sanctuary Wood)

So it Runs

In Trafalgar Square

To Siegfried Sassoon (Near Bapaume)

Yeats Dances

Dropping Slow

Odyssey

To the Sun (After Akhenaten)

To Rupert Brooke (Grantchester)

Wadi Halfa

Colonial

To Rudyard Kipling (Tyne Cot)

Africa

To Julian Grenfell (Sanctuary Wood)

Hounslow

Heath Row

Cycle, with Cytologist

Middlesex

To One Who Was With Me (St Julien)

To Edward Thomas (Agny)

Hiraeth

Eglwys Llangwyfan

Home Office

To Vera Brittain (Louvencourt)

Piano

Music Group

   Elgar

   New World (1937)

   American Music

   Field

The Mounds at Sutton Hoo

Waldo Williams in Perry 

Aldermaston

Summer (Ernst Stadler)

Bugles (Georg Trakl)

To Charles Sorley (Dunkerque)

To Robert Graves (Dover)

Grodek (Georg Trakl)

Forge House

Kentish

Awre

Note on Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Sun