Still - Meredith, Christopher

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Résumé :
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....

Biographie:
Christopher Meredith is the award-winning author of six volumes of fiction, including the classic Shifts and The Book of Idiots, and several poetry collections. His newest works are a poetry collection, Still, and a novel, Please, both to be released simultaneously 2021. He was born and brought up in Tredegar and lives in Brecon....

Sommaire:
Christopher Meredith is the award-winning author of five novels and five collections of poetry and also translates 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 Wales Book of the Year. His collection of poems, The Meaning of Flight, was longlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2006. 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. His novel Please and new poetry collection Still were published simultaneously in 2021....