The Familiar

Gordon Meade lives with his family on the coast of Fife where he divides his time between his own writing and running creative writing courses for vulnerable young people. He is also a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow most recently attached to the University of Dundee.

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