Meridian

by Nancy Gaffield

Between 2015 and 2017, Nancy Gaffield walked the 270-mile Greenwich Meridian Trail from Peacehaven to Sand le Mere, in order to investigate the way that landscapes are disturbed and reordered by history and memory. In Meridian, the line of longitude is the ‘zero point’ through which these forces speak: the intersecting planes of poetry and song, politics and the polis, land and sea, presence and absence, shadow and light.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Hardcover

Published February 8, 2019

Reviews

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the movement in this poetry, the sense of time and distance and place

[JLS · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poet should be like the scientist
“who begins by learning
what has been discovered already”

The author has affirmed her style and approach by giving us a very methodic view on landscape. As if she had scalped he surroundings and describe only as a dissected sample.
Causality and effects are furthermore haunting throughout the text, a Manichaean world she had created.

I have the impression of a rough description showing her as if she’d been pulled down a stream and analysing what’s left to see.

It is in a beautiful poem that she finishes the collection, the journey, in which she has transcended her established world that I really like and think stands out from most of the book.