In Transit

Gordon Meade
(Enthusiastic Press, 2022); pbk £10

In Transit explores Gordon Meade’s reflections of mortality. Informed by his varied and strange perspectives. Meade’s writing is poetic in subject more than form; his pieces are him in conversation with the reader, speaking of his life, his pains. The plainness of his words reinforces his perspective and reflections; neither flowery nor ethereal, it is bold, sharp, painful, and contains a hard, irrefutable hope of life beyond any one death.

One of the opening poems, ‘A Return Visit’ is particularly impactful. Here depiction is depicted as a mocking, violative predator, seeing him as ‘a welcoming host’ even as it will kill him. ‘Cancer By Numbers’ extrapolates the cruelty; the sheer, mindless deaths which precede him; Meade’s limbo existence becomes dominated by both this and the physical pain of his illness:

I have been in transit for far too long. Now, all I want
is the final destination.

Cancer, domineering, impossible, leaves Meade almost beyond hope. Yet coming to peace with his circumstances, brings a certain kind of relief.

[…] I decided to stop. Not to give in, but just
to stop, to take a breather, to allow everything that I had
done to settle down.

In finding the calmness to move forwards, the poet-persona regains his humanity; in ‘Walrus’, he humorously captures his treasured moustache as something that marks out his self-identity with the line,

Vanity, thy name is Walrus.

Self-reflection offers a silver lining to his experience of cancer; it provides perspective, developing one’s self-understanding. However, Meade’s self-reflections might lead to further trauma and guilt, represented in poems that deal with the apathy towards animals and their suffering from his youthful days. ‘Pigeons’ demonstrates the shock in his memories, at what he had done:

There was really nowhere left for them to go,
Except down, weighted with our lead pellets,
onto the silo’s dusty floor.

The imagery carries with it reflections of war, a grim expansion which naturally bears upon it the wider extinctions of nature that Meade represents. The titles of his poems, such as ‘The Perforated Mouse’ and ‘The Prayer Of The Common Newt’ both contain an honest brutality. Victims of a conflict far beyond their reckoning, they can only carry on. In ‘A Street Fox’, they survive, rather than live:

                        the brightness, that
used to light up in its trickster’s eyes,
had dimmed beyond all recognition.

Meade’s guilt is woven into his intensely personal experiences, particularly in the death of his sister, which had left him as ‘only half a person then’. However, he overcomes these deaths, by confronting death; by personifying it, condensing it, he can confront it. ‘Between the Living and the Dead’ has Meade describing the ‘crime’ done to him.

Someone came in the middle of the night
and took her away from me.

Death as a metaphysical, potent presence is suggested and compounded; he ‘intervened’ in their lives, an unwelcome guest like the cancer which embodies him. When Death finally appears in ‘A Matter Of Choice’, however, he wears a strange, foreboding comfort; the duality itself captured in Death’s own words:

Choose carefully, He said, whenever you have a decision
To make. Choose carefully, but live bolder.

The collections final poems expand on this sentiment. ‘A Shortness Of Breath’ has Meade state that:

[…] It is a time to
be grateful for what we have, and not
to focus as we have done in the past,
for far too long, on what it is we lack.

‘A Sort of Chorus’ continues this embracing of life; having come to terms with his mourning, Meade hears the sounds of a pigeon cooing. Despite the past violence he committed, pigeons will live on; despite his own suffering, he will continue living.

[…] it felt
as if, although not musical, almost
Anything might be possible,
Inside that crop of notes.

James McLeish