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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.

This cover shows a painting of a snowy landscape beneath a wintery sky. The fields are small and far away, dotted with bushes. A single black crow sits on the bare branches of a tree in the foreground. The text reads: Still Christopher Meredith.

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.

Old Spyder Under jewelled Aldebaran old Spyder sat, his head hunched down. All matter he thought’s just a flower fight and all that we think heavy light and all that’s truly light seems dark and all that’s truly play seems work. Oh we could shine such a jewelled light but for the memory’s grip on hurt and the interference of the heart.

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

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Friday Poem – ‘Still’ by Christopher Meredith

This week’s Friday Poem is the title poem ‘Still’ from Christopher Meredith’s collection of the same name. Christopher was recently interviewed by Nawr magazine about his poetry and fiction. You can read the issue online via their website.

This cover shows a painting of a winter landscape looked on from far away, the tiny trees visible in the fields. The black branches of a tree are visible in the foreground with a single black crow amongst the branches. The text reads: Still Christopher Meredith.

Christopher Meredith’s new poetry collection Still, uses the title word as a fulcrum to balance various paradoxical concerns: stillness and motion, memory and forgetting, sanity and madness, survival and extinction. Lively and thought-provoking, this is a beautifully crafted, humane and intelligent collection.

“Lyrical, always surprising… His perfect ear tunes in so precisely” – Paul Henry

Still At the banister above you an old man stands in long johns like you’ll never see again except in films, backlit by an open door smiling and lifting a slow hand and you are forever in slow motion sailing down the narrow stairs. Your eyes are rolling up to watch his head inclining gently as you go. That’s all. Rerun it. Look again. He lifts a hand that’s bossed and broad. He smiles and pinpoints of white stubble light the folding cheek. The moustache shifts. No no, they say. You never saw him. He couldn’t stand, and you were far too young. But you did. He could. And were you cradled down the darkening drift, a babe in arms? Again. That backlight is the sun. Same hand slowly raised, same slow-inclining head, same kind smile, his shape at the handrail this time hunched like a passenger who’s slipping from the quay too courteous yet to turn back to the glare of the final room, though he hungers to, and will. Memory is the still of slow forgetting, the black and aching decades boiled to air, cooled to this crawling droplet in the pipe moving still and still in this suspension rolling on its empty convolutions to catch and lose a world in hard white light.

Still is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Still was published simultaneously with Christopher’s latest novel Please. You can buy them as a set on our website for £15.00.

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Friday Poem – ‘On Allt yr Esgair’ by Christopher Meredith

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘On Allt yr Esgair’ by Christopher Meredith from his newly published poetry collection Still. In a unique publishing event, Still is published simultaneously with Christopher’s tragicomic short novel Please. Both are available on our website now.

Christopher Meredith’s new poetry collection Still, uses the title word as a fulcrum to balance various paradoxical concerns: stillness and motion, memory and forgetting, sanity and madness, survival and extinction. Lively and thought-provoking, this is a beautifully crafted, humane and intelligent collection.

“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

Two book deal – purchase both Still and Please for the discounted price of £15.00.

Don’t miss the launch of both books at the Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival from 12pm on Sunday 18 April. Register for free via the festival website here. You only need to register ONCE for access to the entire four-day weekend.