Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 71
ISBN: 9781781726143
Publication date: April 8, 2021
Price: £9.99
‘Beautiful, subtle, mysteriously evasive poems… a great achievement.’ – Jeremy Hooker
‘By any yardstick, Still is a major achievement’. – The Yorkshire Times
‘Still is a polished performance. The poet’s keen eye and characteristically inventive response are the unifying features in an otherwise diverse collection.’ – PN Review
Many though not all of the poems in Christopher Meredith’s collection, Still, explore the web of meanings in the word ‘still’. They meditate on the paradoxes of stillness and motion, on the capacity of memory and imagination to hold life apparently still and the struggle in art to achieve the power implicit in that to connect with the things of the world in a contemplative intensity.
The distillation of a recurring memory of an old man in the title poem becomes simultaneously an intensification of reality and a denaturing of it. Horseshoe crabs on a nesting beach in New England have reached their biological niche, at an evolutionary standstill for millions of years, but live in blind struggle. A Victorian engraver loses his mind attempting to fix his changing native Cornwall forever in his illustrations. In ‘Standing room’, in entering the still room, the stanza, of a poem, we enter a fixity in which we ourselves, as authors or readers, become transient onlookers. Breughel’s winter paintings invite us both to enter a timelessly frozen world and to understand its liquidity which we both observe and are part of.
In the closing sequence, ‘Still air’, which grew from a collaboration with visual artist Sara Philpott and which focuses tightly on a small landscape in the Usk Valley, the multiple, complex, endlessly moving parts of nature in the stars, geology, the seasons, days, moments, are overlaid and integrated with a clarity of vision that may be achieved in moments of perhaps illusory but necessary stillness in a way that’s ultimately affirmative. Such moments of apparent stillness in these and others of the poems became apertures through which to apprehend the contrasted dynamisms of the world.
Still builds on Meredith’s previous collection, Air Histories, shifting between the personal and impersonal, developing a characteristically wide range of forms, techniques, settings and moods from quirky to serious, while increasingly an underlying coherence of vision emerges. Many of the poems feature Welsh landscapes and settings, in common with much of the author’s previous work.
“Lyrical, always surprising, Meredith ‘fixes stillness’ in absences here. His perfect ear tunes in so precisely – especially to the natural world, it’s ‘edge of sense’ – we are left haunted á la Frost, by a deep lonliness in the human condition.” – Paul Henry
Still is published simultaneously with Meredith’s new novel Please. Buy them both at the discounted price of £15.00 here.
Christopher Meredith
Christopher Meredith is the award-winning author of five novels and five collections of poetry and also tranlsates Welsh to English. Prizes include an Eric Gregory Award, the Arts Council of Wales Young Writer Prize and the Fiction Prize for his first novel, Shifts. His second novel, Griffri, was shortlisted for the Book of the Year Award. His collection of poems, The Meaning of Flight, was long-listed for The Book of the Year Award 2006. His most recent full novel is The Book of Idiots (2012). He has given readings all over Britain and Europe as well as in Israel/Palestine and the USA. Born and brought up in Tredegar, he was a steelworker and a schoolteacher before becoming a professor of creative writing at the University of Glamorgan. He lives in Brecon. A collection of six short fictions, titled Brief Lives, was released in 2018.
In 2021 Seren published his short novel Please simultaneously with a new poetry collection Still. Buy both for the discounted price of £15.00 in our two-book deal.
“Christopher Meredith’s richly engaging new poetics of time and observation gives unconscious lyrical direction to Roland Barthes’ philosophical enquiry into the capturing of a photographic moment … Meredith’s astonishing observational facility is, in the traditional sense, disinterested. A bristling battery of formal skills and a calculated approach seem to enable detachment, even if the poet’s tone is sometimes betrayed by the sustained insinuation of history and experience.”
Steve Whitaker, The Yorkshire Times
“Poets are people to whom language comes unnaturally, and I daresay in the right company, and by halfway through the third pint, Meredith’s fluency could reach a point of virtuoso excess. But when writing he knows how to temper the gift, and not only by a mastery of form (which didn’t save Auden, for instance, from his late windiness) but by a respect for the resistance of words themselves – the material, historical and ethical ballast that partly determines what can be done with them.”
Steven Lovatt, The Friday Poem
“Still is a quiet, contemplative book which offers no certainties aside from the fact that Meredith’s words deserve to outlive his time.”
Joshua Rees, Buzz Magazine
“Technically very subtle and varied, with an unobtrusive tracery of half-rhyme running through it, this collection has moments where it veers into ballad, legend and folk-tale territory. … It’s interesting that both the novel and this collection have monosyllabic titles. This certainly is not because Meredith’s lifelong fascination with, and delight in, words is diminishing, but there is at times in these poems a sense of spareness, of a view pared down to what matters: the bones of a landscape, the space where a person is, or sometimes is not.”
Sheenagh Pugh
