The Meaning of Flight

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.