The Giddings

An unnamed traveller is distracted from his business trip by a sign 'To the Giddings'. He sets off walking through the Huntingdonshire landscape, with its Civil War associations and modern military bases, past wind turbines and fragments of ancient woodland, the trees providing a commentary in a variety of verse forms - lyrical, sardonic, admonitory. But it turns out that he is also walking through time and, after a powerful encounter with Nicholas Ferrar in 17th-century Little Gidding, towards a mysterious metamorphosis. In the tradition of The Pilgrim's Progress, and owing something to Ted Hughes's Gaudete, this ingenious and musical interweaving of verse and prose continues John Greening's earlier series of long 'dream poems'. Composed before the pandemic, The Giddings still tells a highly relevant story about a search for spiritual meaning and the power of nature in dark times.