{"id":280,"date":"2011-06-06T19:59:35","date_gmt":"2011-06-06T19:59:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=280"},"modified":"2011-06-06T19:59:35","modified_gmt":"2011-06-06T19:59:35","slug":"john-greenings-bestiary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/john-greenings-bestiary\/","title":{"rendered":"John Greening's 'Bestiary'"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poet's Bestiary<\/span>

Attempting to hammer some live thing out of the words,<\/span>
black and white, green, it hangs on the feeder.<\/span>

<\/font><\/p>\n

            \u25cf<\/span><\/font>
<\/div>\n


A sentence better not to have set free, it curls<\/span>
and plays dead, v on its neck, forked tongue.<\/span>

            \u25cf<\/span>

Carelessly it leaps from home to home, rattling<\/span>
Grey I may be, but I still have all my teeth.<\/span>

            \u25cf<\/span>

No ideas, but listen, here comes Ottava<\/span>
Rima, taps on a web-page, sits there waiting. <\/span>

            \u25cf<\/span>

Between a stroke and an attack, she\u2019s wrapped<\/span>
around my arm like a blood pressure monitor.<\/span>

            \u25cf<\/span>

In a brown study, at last words begin.<\/span>
That ******* white dog squatting on our lawn.<\/span>




*John Greening<\/a><\/span>'s Hunts: Poems 1979-2009<\/span>, a selection from earlier books. His Poetry Masterclass<\/a> was published this May  – a complete tool-kit for reading, writing or teaching poetry.  He received a Cholmondeley Award in 2008 and a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2010.<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poet's BestiaryAttempting to hammer some live thing out of the words,black and white, green, it hangs on the feeder.             \u25cf A sentence better not to have set free, it curlsand plays dead, v on its neck, forked tongue.            \u25cfCarelessly it leaps from home to home, rattlingGrey I may be, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}