Knot

Knot
by John Greening


Knot is a miniature masterpiece.” The Warwick Review

Based on the design of a seventeenth-century knot garden, John Greening’s new sequence makes consort music with the poets of Elizabethan England. Sonnets and verse letters are woven around a journal of life in a twenty-first century writers’ retreat (Hawthornden Castle) and a prose allegory of Ben Jonson’s famous walk from London to Scotland to visit William Drummond. The collection concludes with a witty modern masque.

“a wonderful mixture of forms (both poetry and prose)… Greening is exceptionally deft with the material, marrying past and present in an effective mix that seeks to return ‘artifice’ to its fully positive Renaissance meaning of carefully crafted art.”

N.S. Thompson, Stand

“Knot celebrates a meeting of minds, that sense of common ground between writers, whether in a century of masques or today, in a retreat for writers from all over the world. It questions how poets and poetry can matter and make a difference.”

Pippa Little, Elsewhere: A Review of Contemporary Poetry

Published: 30 April 2013
ISBN: 978 1 905208 1 80
Pages: 54
Price: £8.00



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