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    Misadventure
    Misadventure
    Misadventure
    Ebook57 pages18 minutes

    Misadventure

    By Richard Meier

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    About this ebook

    Misadventure won the inaugural Picador Poetry Prize, and is Richard Meier’s first collection. Misadventure is a book about what we learn, and what we refuse to learn: although Meier’s poems are often deceptively quiet in their address, the reader will soon discover a poet capable of illuminating the darkest corners of our lives by the very lightest of touches, and an ear simultaneously attuned to the lyric poem and the cadence of real speech. The collection also contains some disarmingly tender poetry on the experience of fatherhood. Misadventure is about all the hope and hopelessness lurking just below the surface of things, in our rooms, tables, coats and gardens – and leaves them enriched and strange, under the transforming eye of a fine new talent.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPan Macmillan
    Release dateMar 29, 2012
    ISBN9781447213116
    Misadventure
    Author

    Richard Meier

    Richard Meier lives in north London with his wife, daughter and son. Misadventure is his first book.

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      Book preview

      Misadventure - Richard Meier

      For Verity

      Contents

      Winter morning

      Misadventure

      Fabric

      For a bridge suicide

      The promise

      Crocuses

      The top field

      Walking near Arundel

      Sky sports

      The Feeder

      Psychotherapy

      Opening and closing of the double-glazed man

      Domestic

      Sea Palling

      Tables for two

      Renunciation

      Three weeks to go

      Moment

      That we might have a garden

      Building Matilda

      I – In time

      II – Roulette

      III – The science bit

      IV – Portrait of a woman in the first weeks of pregnancy

      V – Routine scan

      VI – Section

      VII – Petal

      VIII – First birthday

      Early learning

      Compos mentis

      Write about what you know

      A hopeless gardener thanks his wife

      Relative

      Blackberrying in a time of recession

      On the road out of Roussillon

      Conditions

      The tour-guide

      Maddened by this world

      We’ll always have Paris

      White out

      Still

      Please collect all winter coats

      To a new teacher

      Canute explains

      Da capo

      Acknowledgements

      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,

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