A Poem by John Greening

Caesarion

As the boy plays
on a plinth in Gaul
or stands forever

guarded by a hawk
at Edfu, empty
eye sockets are

the blackness of
a night sky
missing its sixteen

closest stars, bright
years, which lie
in pieces on the earth.

He was not Osiris,
but Caesarion, and
one of Caesar’s

‘too many Caesars’

John Greening has received the Bridport Prize, the TLS Prize and a Cholmondeley Award. He has published over twenty collections, notably To the War Poets (2013) and The Silence (2019), both with Carcanet. There have been several recent pamphlets and his selected reviews and essays on poetry (Vapour Trails)have just appeared. Earlier books include Heath, with Penelope Shuttle and the Egypt memoir, Threading a Dream. He has edited Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War for OUP and the poetry of Geoffrey Grigson and Iain Crichton Smith (Carcanet, 2021). His critical studies cover the Elizabethans, Hardy, Yeats, Edward Thomas, WW1 Poets, and Ted Hughes. Anthologies include Accompanied Voices (on composers), Ten Poems about Sheds and Hollow Palaces (country house poems – with Kevin Gardner). His American Selected appears in 2023. A longstanding TLS reviewer and Gregory Award judge, he has collaborated with musicians such as Roderick Williams, and was RLF Writing Fellow at Newnham College.