Air Histories E-Book

Christopher Meredith

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 41

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Air Histories opens with a poem about a neolithic arrowhead uncovered by manmade environmental damage after lying for millenia in a Welsh mountaintop. It closes with a rollicking poem urging action to heal the wounds of the same piece of earth. In a dazzling range of styles and registers and diverse poems, Christopher Meredith explores the power of human ingenuity for good or ill, for making music or making war, and our fragile grasp of this ingenuity. The blind Oedipus makes a tortured, fragmentary speech to Antigone; a medieval chronicler is unable to write a word when history seems to stand still; a baffled Spanish priest in the 19th century tries to penetrate the mystery of how a guitar is made; an old woman who has forgotten almost everything else holds on to the secret alchemy of making gravy. Threading the collection are poems relating to landscape, especially to the Black Mountains. Air Histories is Christopher Meredith's fourth collection of poems. He is also is the author of four novels. "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 Guardian

Leseprobe

Air Histories

Also by Christopher Meredith

Poems

This

Snaring Heaven

The Meaning of Flight

Black Mountains: poems & images

from the Bog~Mawnog Project

Novels

Shifts

Griffri

Sidereal Time

The Book of Idiots

For children

Nadolig bob Dydd

Christmas Every Day

As editor

Moment of Earth

Five Essays on Translation (with Katja Krebs)

Translation

Melog a novel by Mihangel Morgan

Air Histories

Christopher Meredith

Seren is the book imprint of

Poetry Wales Press Ltd.

57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE

www.serenbooks.com

Facebook: facebook.com/SerenBooks

Twitter: @SerenBooks

The right of Christopher Meredith to be identified as

the author of this work has been asserted in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

© Christopher Meredith 2013

ISBN: 978-1-78172-074-5

ISBN e-book: 978-1-78172-076-9

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council.

Cover photograph: ‘Daedalus with a paramotor’ © V. Meredith.

Printed in Bembo by Berforts Group, Stevenage.

Author’s Website: http://christophermeredith.webs.com/

Contents

Arrowhead

Borderland

Trees on Castell Dinas

What earth thought

The record keepers

Y grib

Ridge

At Colonus

The churches

The guitar maker Antonio de Torres in old age described by the priest Juan Martínez Sirvent

The ones with the white hats

Birth myth

The slurry pond

Daniel’s piano

Guitar

Not quite Apollo

Think of this

The strange music

Seeing the birds

Stori’r mynydd

Under the mountain

Alchemical

Peth doeth

You were right to come

Twobeat deathsong

Dream

Dim byd

Nothing

Bro Neb: yr arweinlyfr

An outline description of Nihilia

This late

An empty chair, the old man’s face

Birch

Thaws and disappointments

We dream of snow

The fiddler’s frown

Daedalus with a paramotor

Earth air

The near myth

The wool of the sheep that bit you

Acknowledgements

Notes

Arrowhead

fire

unlock

ed the mou

ntain and rain

and wind brush

ed earth by to strip

to air what’s reified

in stone, green double

wavelets in a piece of sea

jade flatfish swimming time

a hardening of fallen sky that

should whisper death or meat but

somehow can’t becoming something

never meant in all the patient knapping

to perfected brittle symmetry strange midair

fingerprint stone cursor pointing to this hour

flint promise of our later fire that never

flew or sang till

now

Borderland

Ffin is the Welsh for border. It occurs inside diffiniad which means definition, and in Capel y Ffin, a place in the Black Mountains.

You’ll find a ffin inside each definition.

We see what is when we see what it’s not: edges are where meanings happen.

On the black whaleback of this mountain earth curves away so sky can start to show a ffin’s a kind of definition

where skylarks climb across earth’s turn to air and pulsing muscle turns to an artful song the edge that lets a meaning happen.

Live rock can yield to mortared stone, a city to a castle, then a shepherd’s hut, where ffin’s contained inside a definition,

where the lithic turns into the human.

Here’s where things fall together, not apart at edges that let meanings happen.

And self here blurs into annihilation.

Larkfall, earthfall, skyfall, manfall each create the ffin that is the place of definition the edges where we see our meanings happen.

Trees on Castell Dinas

Stripped to their themes the winter trees are the sum of their seasons

bombbursts of filaments in pulsing harmonics enact their contentions in air

work into eyesight with ogive writhing invisible veins of the wind

solidify rhythms into the pathways of hunger for light

What earth thought

When wind blows to kill rain, earth thinks warmer under sun and breathes smoke. Grass squeezes out of stone, walks under tree and over mountain. Man walks with animals under moon. Dog drinks lake. Child sucks woman.

Child sleeps with smell of milk and woman who sings to call the seed from earth. Man sings to beasts. Dog sings to moon. They turn their hunger into breath. They walk the belly of the mountain. They hit the yellow fire from stone.

And what swells in grass, with stone and stone they kill. The woman burns seed under mountain. They laugh it out from blackened earth. They turn their hunger out of breath. They sleep beneath the bitten moon.

The river’s warm with yellow moon swimming above the river stones. They sing the songs of warmth, and breathe the song of meat and fruits. The woman knows that ice will bite the earth and grass sleep again on mountain.

Black cloud will kill white, and mountain float in lakes of rain. The moon will die, and snow will say to earth: