Snaring Heaven

"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 TLS 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.

Christopher Meredith is a poet, novelist and currently lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan. Born in Tredegar and educated at Abersytwyth and Swansea, he worked for some time in a south Wales steel plant, and as a teacher. His novels are Shifts, Griffri and Sidereal Time, and he is the author of a collection of poetry, Snaring Heaven. His books are taught in universities in Wales and England.