Christopher Meredith

Christopher Meredith Poems

Christopher Meredith Biography

Christopher Meredith (born 1955) is a poet and novelist from Tredegar, Wales. Personal Life He was educated at Tredegar Comprehensive school and later studied philosophy and English at Aberystwyth University. He has a wife (Valerie) and two sons, Rhodri and Steffan. Meredith lives with his family in Brecon, and teaches creative writing at the University of Glamorgan. Published works He has published three collections of poetry, This, Snaring Heaven and The Meaning of Flight and three novels, Shifts, Griffri and Sidereal Time. All are published by Seren. A children's book in Welsh, Nadolig Bob Dydd, was published in 2000 by Gomer Press, Llandysul, Ceredigion. Meredith has also translated Mihangel Morgan's novel Melog from Welsh into English. His first collection of poems, This, won the Welsh Arts Council Young Writer Prize and his first novel, Shifts, won the Welsh Arts Council Fiction Prize. His historical novel Griffri, was shortlisted for the Welsh Book of the Year Award. His poetry collection The Meaning of Flight was longlisted for the Welsh Book of the Year Prize 2006.)

The Best Poem Of Christopher Meredith

What Flight Meant

I held the art of dying
in my hand today.
Her hurt wings folded in my loose fist
yielding as the fingers of a glove -
a swallow that dipped quick
trawling insects in the lane
clouted by some windscreen out of air
and thud,
distilled into precision.

What flight meant
was the pulsing line of gorging and delight
that drew the smooth blur
of her x on air.

But look. All's gone hard edge.
Swallows are taut arrangements
of black pins and scimitars.
Tailfins, wingtips and the tiny beak
are stanleyknifed to pinpoints.

The swooping black dart of her back
's been startled off by stillness,
fixed different
in these thumbsized shoulders
of intenser poison blue.

The forehead's no black smudge
nor red either, quite,
but minute scumblings of rust.

Those legs that weren't there when she flew
are clean black needles now
as there as sculpture,
and her claws
machines designed to clutch at straws.

When the world's smacked loose from meaning
all's knocked to fuss and artifice and pattern.
Your dying relatives in their beds
see your dentistry, the stitching on your shirt,
contemplate the thereness of their fingertips.

And her. Her eyes are big as black pinheads
clinical as an artist's
amazed this suddenly to see the world,
its mad particularity
so sharp and quick with colour,
so stopped.

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