JOHN GREENING lives in Huntingdonshire where he teaches. He has travelled and worked in Germany, the United States and Egypt, but his collection with Cargo, Gascoigne's Egg, marks his return to English mythologies.

     His other books include a selected, Nightflights (1998) and five others. His song cycle, Falls, was performed at the Wigmore Hall in June 2000, and he has just received a Society of Authors grant to travel to Iceland. He is reviewer with several poetry magazines.
Gascoigne's Egg, is a powerful piece mingling the tragic fate of the airship R101 and the memories of the Elizabethan poet George Gascoigne.

GASCOIGNE'S EGG

Limited Edition  ISBN 1 899980 08 3   paper £ 8.50 246x154  24 pp.  Images by Robert McNab

A powerful poem mingling the tragic fate of the airship R101 and the memories of the Elizabethan poet George Gascoigne, whose estate once extended over the site where the the airship was built. The poem explores the complex weaving of past and present and the hubris that culminates in the flight's disastrous end.

        'The story of Empire and of English poetry
          is of innumerable repair jobs. Free verse
          becomes the spidery structure of the ship

          and metaphor the lighter-than-air lift for it –
          but in an age whose longing has outstripped grey
          polluted skies, whose desire is to go

          beyond the grimy spheres, the moon
          and smeared galaxies, into pure black
          where time ends, your craft must carry you....'

of a previous collection: 'Reticent, humane, ruefully observant... quietly effective explorations of half-remembered places.'
                        ... Neil Powell: Poetry Review.