The most significant writer among these prizewinners … I take to be Christopher Meredith. He writes with freedom and perhaps unfashionable eloquence about alienation and doubt. So wrote Michael Hofman in the T.L.S. of the 1983-84 Gregory Award winners.

Meredith’s first short book, This, went on to win the Welsh Arts Council Young Writer Prize in 1985. Snaring Heaven, his first full-length collection, includes some poems from the now unavailable This, many more original pieces, and some free translations from the Welsh.

The subjects range from a scratched LP, to the planet Jupiter, to a man with a cardboard box on his head, to, in the longer poems, an attempt at considering the relationship between what’s inner and personal, and the outer political world.