Christopher Meredith

Jack Priday, down-at-heel and almost down and out, returns to his hometown towards the end of the 1970s after a decade's absence, just looking for a way to get by. His life becomes entangled with those of old friends Keith, Judith and O, and with the slow death throes of the male-dominated heavy industries that have shaped and defined the region and its people for almost two centuries. As circumstances shift around them, the principals are forced to find some understanding of them and to confront their own secret natures. From multiple viewpoints, Shifts is a slowburning, controlled and intense examination of the relationship between our inner lives, the people around us and the forces of history.

‘Punctuation killed my wife.’ So opens Christopher Meredith’s novel, Please. Octogenarian Vernon, who’s never written anything longer than a memo, tries to write the story of his apparently unremarkable courtship and marriage from the 1960s to today. How should he do it? His lifelong obsessions are language and reading; most of what he knows about the world comes from dictionaries and reference books, and from these and the language of old novels he concocts and wrestles with his ‘voice’. From beneath Vernon’s comically elegant struggles and games with language a picture emerges of a man and woman across half a century, of how passion, infidelities, murderous fantasy and obsessions can be undercurrents even in the most ordinary of lives. Please is a love story about the impossibility of being in love and the impossibility of telling stories. Sophisticated and controlled, it explores how hard it is to know yourself or others, how language has the power to conceal even as it reveals. How much can we know? How much can we say? Meredith’s fifth novel, full of humanity, sly humour and verbal invention, is his shortest and arguably his funniest, most innovative and most outrageous. It’s a tragicomedy touching on themes of the limits of knowledge, on isolation, and male frailty in new and playful ways. The whole gradually and inexorably unlocks the meanings of its extraordinary opening sentence in a complex and dazzling psychological and linguistic entertainment that ends in a surprising, dreamlike and ultimately moving denouement.

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.

From the nightmarish first story set in the South China Sea in 1946 to the final piece, set nowhere at the end of time, Brief Lives demonstrates in a short compass a huge range in technique and milieu and a unity of theme and sensibility. It opens naturalistically but is distinctly non-realist by the close. We meet an ex-collier in 1950 anguishing over whether to return to the pit, a young mother in the early 1960s quietly shepherding those around her through a bleak Christmas day, an industrial chemist in this century plunged into vortices of memories that cause him to question his grasp of the world, and more. Meredith’s fiction has been marked by its willingness to push at literary boundaries, and Brief Lives is no exception: it is an intense distillation of Meredith’s abiding concerns to explore how memory shapes the present and the present shapes memory, the interplay between beautifully realised individual lives and the wider historical process, and the paradox of simultaneous human isolation and community.

The poetic world of the Song of Songs is a famously heady and distortive landscape, filled with bright sunlit rills, nocturnal cityscapes, and fecund bodies laid out like kingdoms. But what does the Song's use and abuse of spatial relationships tell us about its subject matter, and what do its strange panoramas tell us about literary space more broadly? Directly challenging recent methodological trends in biblical spatial studies, Journeys in the Songscape uses a range of innovative critical tools to explore, map and critique poetic space in the Song of Songs. Taking the reader on a series of journeys across the Song's gendered, rural, urban and bodily spaces, Meredith argues that the worlds that spring up between the Song's lovers are all subtle reimaginings of the space between the biblical page and its own readers, and that at the heart of the Song is a (con)fusion of the dynamics of loving with the experience of reading. Love is at work in the Song, says Meredith, but it is not its subject so much as a sign under which collusions of power, textuality, space and subjectivity labour. The Song's world speaks not only to sexual relationships, then, but to the structure of language itself; textual spaces do not organize textual meaning but rather image its fundamental instability. Journeys in the Songscape is a bold new literary treatment of the Song of Songs, but it is also a rethinking of what we mean by the term 'literary space', and represents a playful incitement to reconsider how critical tools are put to use in apprehending space as a literary construct.

Christopher Meredith's latest collection is filled with gorgeous, original depictions of the landscape of Wales, especially the Black Mountains near the author's home. Beginning in the Stone Age and ending in the future, well-known forms appear alongside vigorous experiments, all touching on the various histories, and human fallibilities, that shape our present lives." The defining feature of Christopher Meredith's poetry is an exquisite, almost painful precision. But there is also beauty and a bright, self-deprecating wit." Sarah Crown, The GuardianChristopher Meredith was born in Tredegar. His most recent poetry collection, The Meaning of Flight (Seren, 2005), was longlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Award in 2006. His novels, all published by Seren, are Griffri (1995), Shifts (1997), Sidereal Time (1998) and The Book of Idiots (2012). His many prizes include an Eric Gregory Award. A former steelworker and schoolteacher, he now teaches Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan, and lives in Brecon.

In The Book of Idiots, tipsy, sick Wil Daniel tells the narrator, Dean, a tale that may be a ghost story or a romance, a farce or a tragedy. Meanwhile we get glimpses of Dean's own half-lived life, and those of friends and colleagues. These threads develop into a dark, offbeat and merciless examination of maleness and mortality. Can Clive regain the triumphs he achieved at the age of nine? Will Jeff stop his swimming trunks from dissolving? Outstanding in its use of dialogue to reveal character, this superbly written novel develops into a meditation on kinds of suffering that are no less acute for being routine." Meredith's first novel for 14 years is a darkly comic triumph full of uncomfortable truths." Shortlist"'You will sail through this hilarious black comedy at one sitting…. It is a literary masterpiece… a thriller in which we guess who survives rather than who will die next." Gwen Davies, Western Mail "This is a fine novel… hard to put down and an adventure in meaning." Jeremy Hooker Christopher Meredith is the author of the award-winning Shifts. The Book of Idiots is his fourth novel.

This anthology contains writing by many of the greatest authors of Wales. From Wilfred Owen and David Jones, Dylan Thomas and Dannie Abse to Christopher Meredith and Gillian Clarke, it spans a century which saw both the barbarism of mechanised warfare and the development of mass communication, mass literacy and a flourishing of creative endeavour. After the First Death draws on the experience of those who have faced death on the battlefield, and on others who have sought to put into words the complex philosophical, political and emotional responses that military action demands. Including poetry, extracts from fiction, memoirs, letters and biography, the book moves from World War One via the ideological battleground of the 1930s into the Second World War, then through the Cold War, Vietnam, the Falklands and the Gulf wars. Tony Curtis is Professor of Poetry at the University of Glamorgan where he directs an MPhil in Writing. He has published 26 books, including nine poetry collections, most recently Heaven's Gate (2001). A selection of his poetry has recently been translated and published in Armenia.

One of the most exciting works of modern Welsh-language fiction, available in English for the first time. The dull life of unemployed academic Dr Jones changes forever when he sees a young man naked on a building top, threatening to jump to his death. Persuaded to come down, the stranger is befriended by Jones. Melog says he is exiled from Laxaria, a country colonised by Sacria, which has banned the Laxarian language and destroyed its books. He has come to Wales in search of a lost Laxarian manuscript, the Imalic, the only surviving copy of his country's legends. Drawing on the themes of cats, non-communication and political oppression, Melog is at once a tender story of friendship and a satire of the purpose and intent which dominate people's lives. One of the most distinctive Welsh novels of recent years, it is eloquently translated by Christopher Meredith. Mihangel Morgan lives in Aberystwyth, where he lectures in modern Welsh literature. Christopher Meredith is a prizewinnng novelist in the English language. Several of his poetry collections are published by Seren.

This new collection of poems is Meredith's first since Snaring Heaven from the early nineties. Meredith is well-known as a novelist, and his poetry shares some of the qualities that make his fiction so memorable: a palpable passion for landscape and humanity's place in it, an inventive and versatile verbal imagination, a distinctive voice that can range from the contemplative to the ironic, even satiric. His new work in this collection combines the usual engagement with the wider world and a freer movement between personal and impersonal voices. Recurring concerns are the relationships between belonging and dislocation, contemplation and action, fixity and movement, the ambivalent relationship between the world and art's attempt to pan out its nugget." Meredith is particularly skilled at capturing animal life in a quizzically respectful manner... Seren already enjoys a well -established reputation for an impressive roster of poets with stylish collections"The NorthChristopher Meredith is a poet, novelist and currently lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan. Born in Tredegar and educated at Abersytwyth and Swansea, he worked for some time in a south Wales steel plant, and as a teacher. His novels are Shifts, Griffri and Sidereal Time, and he is the author of a collection of poetry, Snaring Heaven. His books are taught in universities in Wales and England.

Clint and Dustin are coconuts, 10L have turned into three-toed sloths, Gron is becoming Zero Mostel, the lower sixth is an airliner of people about to fall out of the sky, and you, you've turned into a three-eyed Martian who speaks a nounless language and has forgotted to pay the child minder. But what's all this got to do with sixteenth century Ermland? It's an ordinary week in post-industrial south Wales, and alienated desperation is as much fun as it's ever been. Sidereal Time, starting with the experiences of Sarah, a school teacher feeling the first intimations of middle age, explores the cussed paradox of the way life can be predictable and yet not follow any script you've prepared. Christopher Meredith is a poet, novelist and currently lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan. Born in Tredegar and educated at Abersytwyth and Swansea, he worked for some time in a south Wales steel plant, and as a teacher. His novels are Shifts, Griffri and Sidereal Time, and he is the author of a collection of poetry, Snaring Heaven. His books are taught in universities in Wales and England.

In the dream I'm travelling very fast and without effort high over the ground as if I'm a bird flying. There's the trackless mass of trees and strips of mountain ridges and the thread of river like sour milk. The sky is dark blue and red like bruises. I swoop down and then up to miss smashing into the crowns of the trees and I see the bruised air and the black horizon. I come to a figure standing on the heather. He stands with his arms flung out, the fingers spread, like branches. I come close to his face, to his untidy red moustache and his head split by an appalling wound. On two nights separated by a gap of a dozen years, Griffri ap Berddig, a poet at the court of a minor Welsh prince of the twelfth century, tells his life story to a Cistercian monk. Part boast and part confession, his words turn into a compelling narrative which develops through an accumulation of obsessive images towards self-revelation. A complex mixture of historical detail and invention, Griffri is a serious and entertaining novel examining the limits of our knowledge of the world and ourselves. Christopher Meredith is a poet, novelist and currently lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan. Born in Tredegar and educated at Abersytwyth and Swansea, he worked for some time in a south Wales steel plant, and as a teacher. His novels are Shifts, Griffri and Sidereal Time, and he is the author of a collection of poetry, Snaring Heaven. His books are taught in universities in Wales and England.

"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 TLS 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 new 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. Christopher Meredith is a poet, novelist and currently lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan. Born in Tredegar and educated at Abersytwyth and Swansea, he worked for some time in a south Wales steel plant, and as a teacher. His novels are Shifts, Griffri and Sidereal Time, and he is the author of a collection of poetry, Snaring Heaven. His books are taught in universities in Wales and England.