Air Histories

Air Histories opens with a poem about a neolithic arrowhead uncovered by manmade environmental damage after lying for millenia in a Welsh mountaintop. It closes with a rollicking poem urging action to heal the wounds of the same piece of earth. In a dazzling range of styles and registers and diverse poems, Christopher Meredith explores the power of human ingenuity for good or ill, for making music or making war, and our fragile grasp of this ingenuity. The blind Oedipus makes a tortured, fragmentary speech to Antigone; a medieval chronicler is unable to write a word when history seems to stand still; a baffled Spanish priest in the 19th century tries to penetrate the mystery of how a guitar is made; an old woman who has forgotten almost everything else holds on to the secret alchemy of making gravy. Threading the collection are poems relating to landscape, especially to the Black Mountains. Air Histories is Christopher Meredith's fourth collection of poems. He is also is the author of four novels. «The defining feature of Christopher Meredith's poetry is an exquisite, almost painful precision. But there is also beauty and a bright, self-deprecating wit» Sarah Crown, The Guardian