Review:
Still
by Christopher Meredith and
Please
by Christopher Meredith
From Planet 243
Tony Brown
reviews
Still
by Christopher Meredith
and
Please by Christopher Meredith
Seren, £9.99
The title of Christopher Meredith’s new collection of poems, Still, is a pun, the perceptive and often creatively resonant holding-together of more than one meaning: ‘still’ as lack of movement and ‘still’ in its chronological sense. The two meanings come together in the epigraph to the first poem, ‘Moving picture’: ‘Memory dislikes motion’. Memory catches a moment in time, stills it, indeed distills it: intensifies it. But at the same time the moment is paradoxically dynamic, vital, poised: ‘the journey always incomplete and moving / still?’. In the title poem a random childhood memory freeze-frames an almost visionary glimpse of his grandfather, backlit by the sun on a stairway landing: ‘Memory is the still of slow forgetting’. And we are aware that a ‘still’ can also be a single frame from a motion picture.
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