The Familiar

"The Familiar", Gordon Meade's third collection from Arrowhead, asks us to examine the familiar, no matter how unfamiliar at times that may be.

In "The Swinging Sixties", the strained relationship between a young child and his troubled mother is painfully revealed. "Shooting Venice" unmasks one of the most familiar and unfamiliar of cities. "We Live By The Sea" and "Other Nations" move to ground made familiar in Meade's earlier volumes, the Scottish coastline and man's relationship with the natural world. "A Disembodied Voice" brings the collection to completion with a series of elegies. "Gordon Meade loves, and fears, the sea. His images swirl into eddies sharing with us his pleasure in patterning language and playing with rhythm and incantatory forms.

These are brave, and dark, poems in which Meade, like his heron, contemplating the firth, doesn't flinch from contemplating death and loss.

Some of his poems here are exquisitely bleak, like mourning jewels". (Valerie Thornton). "The rhythms of Meade's poems are exceptional and the verbal virtuosity is remarkable". (Niall McGrath). "Meade's poetry is well-crafted and well-observed; and at its best combines the outward with an inward observation to create poetry of true insight". (Ron Butlin).