21st October, 2022

Friday Poem – ‘Old Spyder’ by Christopher Meredith

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Old Spyder’ by Christopher Meredith from his collection Still. You can hear Christopher chatting about Still and his novel Please on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

Still uses the title as a fulcrum to balance paradoxical concerns: stillness and motion, memory and forgetting, sanity and madness, survival and extinction. The old man in the title poem is seen standing, backlit by an open door. Fixing this in the mind is both memorial and a means of partial forgetting, of releasing him into history. The closing set of poems ‘Still Air’ focuses on a small landscape in the Usk Valley, observing the multiple, complex, endlessly moving parts of nature in the stars, geology, the seasons, the days. Lively and thought provoking, this is a beautifully crafted, insightful and intelligent collection.

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 3 with Christopher Meredith is available to listen to now.

Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and follow or subscribe to have all future editions delivered straight to your podcast feed. Available on all platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts. Don’t forget to leave us a review if you like what you hear.

Both Still and Please are available as a bundle on the Seren website for £15.00