Jack Priday, down-at-heel and almost down and out, returns to his hometown towards the end of the 1970s after a decade's absence, just looking for a way to get by. His life becomes entangled with those of old friends Keith, Judith and O, and with the slow death throes of the male-dominated heavy industries that have shaped and defined the region and its people for almost two centuries. As circumstances shift around them, the principals are forced to find some understanding of them and to confront their own secret natures. From multiple viewpoints, Shifts is a slowburning, controlled and intense examination of the relationship between our inner lives, the people around us and the forces of history.

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.

The most significant writer among these prizewinners - I take to be Christopher Meredith. He writes with freedom and perhaps unfashionable eloquence about alienation and doubt. So wrote Michael Hofman in the T.L.S. of the 1983-84 Gregory Award winners. Meredith's first short book, This, went on to win the Welsh Arts Council Young Writer Prize in 1985. Snaring Heaven, his first full-length collection, includes some poems from the now unavailable This, many more new pieces, and some free translations from the Welsh. The subjects range from a scratched LP, to the planet Jupiter, to a man with a cardboard box on his head, to, in the longer poems, an attempt at considering the relationship between what's inner and personal, and the outer political world.

'Aristotle said, "After coition, all animals are sad." Well I'm not.' So tipsy, shambolic, sick Wil Daniel begins to tell our narrator, Dean, a tale that may be a ghost story or a romance, a farce or a tragedy. Can Clive regain the triumphs he achieved at the age of nine? Will Jeff stop his swimming trunks from dissolving? Meanwhile we get glimpses of Dean's own half-lived life. These threads develop into a dark, off-beat, and merciless examination of maleness and mortality. This superbly written novel is a tour-de- force of revelation of character through dialogue, a meditation on human suffering which is no less acute for being routine and almost invisible to all but the sufferers, some of whom may not survive. Christopher Meredith is author of the award-winning Shifts and also publishes poetry and translations. The Book of Idiots is his fourth novel.

Clint and Dustin are coconuts, 10L have turned into three-toed sloths, Gron is becoming Zero Mostel, the lower sixth is an airliner of people about to fall out of the sky, and you, you've turned into a three-eyed Martian who speaks a nounless language and has forgotted to pay the child minder. But what's all this got to do with sixteenth century Ermland? It's an ordinary week in post-industrial south Wales, and alienated desperation is as much fun as it's ever been. Sidereal Time, starting with the experiences of Sarah, a school teacher feeling the first intimations of middle age, explores the cussed paradox of the way life can be predictable and yet not follow any script you've prepared.

This novel tells the story of the dull life of unemployed academic Dr. Jones and how it changes forever when he sees a young man naked on a building top, threatening to jump to his death. Persuaded to descend, the stranger is befriended by Jones. The stranger, named Melog, explains that he has been exiled from Laxaria, a country colonized by Sacria, which has banned the Laxarian language and destroyed its culture. He has come to Wales in search of a lost Laxarian manuscript, the "Imalic," the only surviving copy of his country's legends. Drawing on themes related to cats, noncommunication, and political oppression, this tender story of friendship is a satire of the purpose and intent that dominate people's lives.

Christopher Meredith's Air Histories starts in the Stone Age and ends in the future. It's marked by formal diversity and a wide range of subjects, with the personal alongside the impersonal and the experimental alongside well-known forms, as well as including some translations from the Welsh. Throughout it engages the rich meanings of its title, touching on the elemental and on historical time, as well as music and story, meditating on human creativity and its fallibilities from knapping an arrowhead to playing the fiddle or making a guitar. Nature is a touchstone, particularly the Black Mountains, near the author's home, but also often seen 'aslant' as in 'Seeing the Birds' where sparrows seem suddenly fierce as eagles.

'In the dream I'm travelling very fast and without effort high over the ground as if I'm a bird flying. There's the trackless mass of trees and strips of mountain ridges and the thread of river like sour milk. The sky is dark blue and red like bruises. I swoop down and then up to miss smashing into the crowns of the trees and I see the bruised air and the black horizon. I come to a figure standing on the heather. He stands with his arms flung out, the fingers spread, like branches. I come close to his face, to his untidy red moustache and his head split by an appalling wound.' On two nights separated by a gap of a dozen years, Griffri ap Berddig, a poet at the court of a minor Welsh prince of the twelfth century, tells his life story to a Cistercian monk. Part boast and part confession, his words turn into a compelling narrative which develops through an accumulation of obsessive images towards self-revelation. A complex mixture of historical detail and invention, Griffri is a serious and entertaining novel examining the limits of our knowledge of the world and ourselves.

A major new collection by leading contemporary English-language Welsh poets and literary scholars, including original poems by Gillian Clarke, Sheenagh Pugh, Tony Conran, Philip Gross, and Tony Curtis, essays by Wynn Thomas, Tony Brown, Jane Aaron, and Gavin Edwards, art history by Peter Lord. The 30 orginal contributions are thematically organized: I. Earth and Words, II.Landscapes, Warscapes, III. Welsh Women Writers, IV. Literature and Art, V. Literature and Religion.

The poetic world of the Song of Songs is a famously heady and distortive landscape, filled with bright sunlit rills, nocturnal cityscapes, and fecund bodies laid out like kingdoms. But what does the Song's use and abuse of spatial relationships tell us about its subject matter, and what do its strange panoramas tell us about literary space more broadly? Directly challenging recent methodological trends in biblical spatial studies, Journeys in the Songscape uses a range of innovative critical tools to explore, map and critique poetic space in the Song of Songs. Taking the reader on a series of journeys across the Song's gendered, rural, urban and bodily spaces, Meredith argues that the worlds that spring up between the Song's lovers are all subtle reimaginings of the space between the biblical page and its own readers, and that at the heart of the Song is a (con)fusion of the dynamics of loving with the experience of reading. Love is at work in the Song, says Meredith, but it is not its subject so much as a sign under which collusions of power, textuality, space and subjectivity labour. The Song's world speaks not only to sexual relationships, then, but to the structure of language itself; textual spaces do not organize textual meaning but rather image its fundamental instability. Journeys in the Songscape is a bold new literary treatment of the Song of Songs, but it is also a rethinking of what we mean by the term 'literary space', and represents a playful incitement to reconsider how critical tools are put to use in apprehending space as a literary construct.