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Showing 1 - 13 of
13 matches in All Departments
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Please (Paperback)
Christopher Meredith
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R312
R255
Discovery Miles 2 550
Save R57 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Brief Lives (Hardcover)
Christopher Meredith
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R318
R263
Discovery Miles 2 630
Save R55 (17%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Still (Paperback)
Christopher Meredith
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R304
R245
Discovery Miles 2 450
Save R59 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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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.
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.
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Melog (Paperback)
Mihangel Morgan; Translated by Christopher Meredith
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R212
Discovery Miles 2 120
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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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.
'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.
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Shifts (Paperback)
Christopher Meredith
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R317
R260
Discovery Miles 2 600
Save R57 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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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.
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.
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Griffri (Hardcover)
Christopher Meredith
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R798
R660
Discovery Miles 6 600
Save R138 (17%)
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Out of stock
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