Air Histories

by Christopher Meredith

Overview

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, 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. Gorgeous and original descriptions of nature in Wales are also prominently featured, particularly the Black Mountains, near the author’s home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781781720745
Publisher:	Seren
Publication date:	10/01/2013
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	9.25(w) x 10.75(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Christopher Meredith is a professor of creative writing at the University of Glamorgan and the author of the novels The Book of Idiots, Griffri, Shifts, and Sidereal Time. He is also the author of three poetry collections and the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, the Arts Council of Wales Young Writer Prize, and the Fiction Prize for his first novel, Shifts.

Table of Contents

Arrowhead 7

Borderland 8

Trees on Castell Dinas 9

What earth thought 10

The record keepers 12

Y grib 14

Ridge 15

At Colonus 16

The churches 19

The guitar maker Antonio de Torres in old age described by the priest Juan Martínez Sirvent 20

The ones with the white hats 23

Birth myth 24

The slurry pond 26

Daniel's piano 27

Guitar 28

Not quite Apollo 30

Think of this 31

The strange music 32

Seeing the birds 35

Stori'r mynydd 36

Under the mountain 37

Alchemical 38

Peth doeth 40

You were right to come 41

Twobeat deathsong 42

Dream 43

Dim byd 44

Nothing 45

Bro Neb: yr arweinlyfr 46

An outline description of Nihilia 47

This late 48

An empty chair, the old man's face 50

Birch 51

Thaws and disappointments 52

We dream of snow 53

The fiddler's frown 54

Daedalus with a paramotor 55

Earth air 56

The near myth 57

The wool of the sheep that bit you 58

Acknowledgements 62

Notes 63