Richard Greene, who will be known to many people as the brilliant biographer of Graham Greene (Russian Roulette: the Life and Times of Graham Greene, 2021) and as the director of the Graham Greene International Festival between 2023 and 2025, is also a fine poet.
Richard’s latest volume – entitled intriguingly (even a little menacingly) Cannibal Rats – was published in Canada in March 2026 to outstanding reviews.
Rich in wisdom and grace, Cannibal Rats is a work of superb poetic craft. Rooting his poems in locales as disparate as the Civil War battlefields of America and the storm-worn shores of his own Newfoundland, ‘where, as almost nowhere else, you can hold / in hand the inner substance of the world,’ Richard bears witness to historical injustices, meditates on how ‘art and memory unravel under the auspices of mortality, and wrestles with the loss of a beloved mother. ‘[T]here’s a limit to what the heart can learn / without pause and repair,’ he writes in a movingly at the end of the volume, ‘but I should return / to this place of bayonets and canon, / small gesture of one still living to what is gone.”
Born in Newfoundland, Richard was educated at Oxford and is currently Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His Boxing the Compass (Signal Editions, 2009) won the Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2010.
Cannibal Rats can be purchased online via Canadian publisher Véhicule Press ahead of more general distribution later in the year.