Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
Still
Still
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Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description
Mae Still , sef casgliad newydd o gerddi gan Chris Meredith yn defnyddio gair unigol y teitl i gyflwyno ystyriaethau paradocsaidd amrywiol: llonyddwch a symud, cof ac anghofio, pwyll a gwallgofrwydd, goroesiad a difodiant. Dyma gasgliad meddylgar wedi'i lunio'n gain a chrefftus, yn ddyngarol ac yn ddeallgar.
Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description
Christopher Meredith's new poetry collection Still , uses the title word as a fulcrum to balance various paradoxical concerns: stillness & motion, memory & forgetting, sanity & madness, survival & extinction. Lively and thought-provoking, this is a beautifully crafted, humane and intelligent collection.
Manylion y cynnyrch / Product details
- ISBN 13
- 9781781726143
- Gwales Code
- gwales.com.9781781726143
- Gwerthwr / Vendor
- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
- Long Title
- Still
- Awdur / Author
- Meredith, Christopher
- Current Price ex VAT
- £10.99
- Current Price inc VAT
- £10.99
- Availability Status (EN)
- Reprinting
- Availability Status (CY)
- Adargraffu
- Dyddiad argaeledd / Availability Date
- 2021-04-08
- Dyddiad cyhoeddi / Publication Date
- 2021-04-08
- Cyhoeddwr / Publisher
- Seren
- Media Type (EN)
- Paperback / softback
- Media Type (CY)
- Clawr meddal
- Pages
- 72 pages
- Size
- 138 × 216 mm
- Language Code
- English
- Categori / Category
- CY: Barddoniaeth (yn Saesneg) | EN: Poetry (in English)
Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography
Widely acknowledged as one of the best writers of his generation in Wales, Christopher Meredith is the award-winning author of five novels and four collections of poetry. 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 the Wales Book of the Year. His collection of poems, The Meaning of Flight, was longlisted for Wales Book of the Year in 2006. His other novels are Sidereal Time (1998) and The Book of Idiots (2012). His collection of short fictions, Brief Lives, appeared in 2018. Other poetry collections include Snaring Heaven (1990) and Air Histories (2013). His newest works are a poetry collection, Still and a novel, Please, both to be released simultaneously in April, 2021. He has given readings all over Britain and Europe as well as in Egypt, Israel/Palestine and the USA. Born and brought up in Tredegar, he has been a steelworker, a schoolteacher and a professor of creative writing at the University of South Wales and now writes full time. He lives in Brecon.
Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review
On the concourse of Liverpool Lime Street Station is a bronze statue of stand-up comedian Ken Dodd. Carrying a suitcase and his trademark ‘tickle stick’, he appears to be heading in a hurry to the train platforms. It’s an unsettling statue: trousers slightly too high, face crudely simplified. Most of all, despite being designed to be in motion, Dodd is simply uncharacteristically still. This public tribute to one of Liverpool’s most famous exports came to mind when reading the poem, ‘Statues of comedians’, in Christopher Meredith’s latest collection of poetry, Still . ‘Oh, the graft, the waste of days, the skill misspent / to kill the laugh bronze dead and miss the point.’ Like a joke explained, the meaning and life of the subject is lost when cast in statue form. Eric Morecambe is ‘not quite dancing’, and Tommy Cooper’s fez ‘...only makes him look dead’. Stillness is not for the comic. Stillness and its many forms make up the focus of this new collection from Meredith, the award-winning author of six volumes of fiction and several poetry collections. The stillness of ‘Statues of comedians’ is humorous and observant, whereas elsewhere in the collection the living world and those we live with become the focus. Stillness takes on multiple forms and the tone shifts as Meredith addresses different moments and forms. In ‘Even in dreamscapes’, the focus appears to be Pieter Breughel’s 1566 painting, Census at Bethlehem . Stillness in this instance is the literally frozen-still characters of a village scene in winter. The poem describes the image in great detail and is a carefully crafted set of images that would be picture-perfect even to those who haven’t seen the painting. Art and photography recur elsewhere in the collection. ‘Air camera’ is a wonderfully simple yet powerfully touching recollection of a moment of familial love. On the top of a mountain, a moment is captured not by a camera, but by the simple act of pretending to take a photograph at a poignant moment: ‘A middle finger clicked A piece of air, That’s one for the memory bank, you said So accidentally filed it Into mine.’ It’s a beautiful scene that captures the significance of a moment. ‘And was it half our lives / ago? A two-shot of the boys...’. ‘Air camera’ is an example of what Meredith does incredibly well: conflating stillness with moments and memory. Stillness is literal in parts of this collection (what could be more still than a bronze statue?), but in some of the more ambiguous and complicated poems the ‘still’ of the collection’s title appears to be a moment and its associated memories. ‘Clearing song’ paints a picture of the moment a home is emptied for a move, while ‘North coast swing’ is a short glimpse at an outdoor swing band. Place, memory, sound and nature all play a part in this multilayered poem. Ending the book is a series of poems, ‘Still air’, originally intended to be a project with an artist and printmaker about the outside world that surrounds him. These are visual and delicately framed on the page in creative layouts that do his surrounding landscapes careful justice. From family, comedians and art to the stillness of nature, Christopher Meredith is an accomplished poet who manages to pull these varying themes and tones together in a collection that feels like one confident voice.
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