In the brief preface to From the East: Sixty Huntingdonshire Codices published recently by Renard Press John Greening describes himself as a champion of localism. To that end he quotes David Constantine in his book Poetry who asks: ‘Why should a local habitation interest anyone but the locals?’ before explaining how a poet working with the local must ‘convert the personal, anecdotal and accidental into the figurative’ and ‘find the ‘allegory’ of their life’.

Greening has been writing poetry committed to Huntingdonshire – a sub-region of Anglian England – since the 1980s and finding within it an opportunity for creative meditation. From the outset he has been poetically exercised and assisted by the irony informing his adoptive geography: Huntingdonshire ceased to exist when it was subsumed within Cambridgeshire in 1974. It thus inhabits – or at least gives him access to – an absent present, a creatively convenient imaginary geography. As the sequence’s title also indicates this terrain is if not predicated on elsewhere at least dependent on it.

This long-term project has also been an exploration of form as much as geography with Greening committing himself to tercets. For much of English literary history the go-to medium in which to be meditative was, of course, blank verse. In that medium the verse paragraphs can extend into philosophical meditations or provide an illusion of impromptu thinking giving the impression of a mind at work in the moment. Tercets offer the challenge not only of rhyme, but of numerous mini-closures and possible fragmentation. In ...