RICHARD MEIER
Hello. I'm Richard Meier, author of Search Party (Picador, 2019) and Misadventure (Picador, 2012), which won the Picador Poetry Prize, was a Poetry Book Society recommendation and was short-listed for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize.
You can get in touch at richard.meier@hotmail.co.uk
Links to poems online
Portrait of a woman in the first weeks of pregnancy
The achievement of naturalism in Green sculpture
An east coast resident stays put
Poems from Search Party
First night home
Despite the rain, like gravel,
the gardensful of air hurled
at walls, forced down the brickwind
instrument of the chimney,
this house will not crumble.
We know this, yet we quail -
for we have brought home fear
all bundled. And only
this aching, anchoring
vigilance for a shield.
On a new one-way system
as if the whole earth had been greased
some great agreement reached
as if this were a reasonable exchange
for speed, such breeziness
as if we could be suited to a world
with nothing oncoming
could be trusted to a sphere
where one cannot stop
as if we were a river
Vacuum
As when, aged nine, not really
thinking, I dived beneath
the three-quarters unfurled
tarpaulin of a swimming pool
and, short of air, surfaced
to find between the water
and the covering only
the meagrest light, and gasped,
grasping what nothing meant,
and dived again, then mad-swam
and made it to the end,
just, you might thing unharmed.
Poems from Misadventure
Winter morning
Shyly coated in greys, blacks, browns –
to keep us out of sight of the cold –
we weren’t expecting this this morning: sun
and shadows, like a summer’s evening, like summer
teasing. And not quite under the shelter on
the northbound platform, an old man, the sun
behind him, just his crown ablaze; and heading
southbound, a woman inching ever nearer
the platform edge, the light a tear
across her midriff, ribcage, shoulders, closer
and closer that dearest thing, completeness,
all her darkness light at the one time.
For a bridge suicide
From four, six, eight feet, maybe even ten,
water’s a giving, all-embracing thing.
Above that, it begins to darken, starts
to slap, to harden, till by fifty or sixty
limbs get broken. Still, even at that height,
you feel if you just got your entry right
you could elicit softness, could slip in...
And yet, for all that, there's a point
when water’s transformation is complete,
a point at which the whole of the earth’s surface
is uniformly unforgiving. As
she neared the top of the bridge’s central stanchion
this was the point she recognised. And let go
Da capo
"That's strange", I'll think, some afternoons
and make to turn off the bathroom light
I’m all but sure I’ve not left on,
only to catch, for the umpteenth time,
the frosted windows splintering sunlight
like it’s hitting water, and stand –
as one who needs reminding – stunned
how sometimes there’s just so much light,
and how it is I never learn.
Reviews
'There was something in Richard Meier's turn of mind, the precision of his ear, the quiet strangeness of his imagery, the tenderness and clarity of his address, that made us want to read his poems again and again. And each time we returned to them there was more to discover, more to be moved by'.
Don Paterson, on judging the Picador Poetry Prize
'This is one of those rare books that will cheer without patronising, and show you how to speak past grief and silence while still holding all that grief and all that silence'.
David Morley, Poetry Review
'Meier has a musical ear, and a command of pause and shape that is at once informal and precise. We shall hear much of him.'
'Richard Meier's brilliant first collection displays a fine sense of humour. The title poem, featuring a man enamoured with a high-pressure patio cleaner who turns it on himself, shoots from the comic to the tragic. "Unlard" is a beautiful word for an ugly process.'
Mark Sanderson in the Sunday Telegraph