Walking Out of the World

Mead Matthew

In "Walking Out of the World", triolets, quatrains and villanelles are interspersed with finely modulated free verse, culminating in the striking sequence "The Sentences of Death". Mead's curiously fascinating poems, with their beguiling echoes of the modern masters and their obsessive focus on uncomfortable truths, are mordantly witty as they confront life and death with eyes wide open. Mead is a poet who, once read, is not forgotten.

About the Author

Matthew Mead (1924-2009) was born in Slapton, Buckinghamshire. He served in the British army from 1942 to 1947, including three years in India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Singapore. He edited the poetry magazine Satis. From 1962 he lived in Germany and, with his wife Ruth, translated many German poets, including Johannes Bobrowski, Heinz Winfried Sabais and Nelly Sachs. His first collection Identities was published in 1967 and a selection of his poems appeared in Penguin Modern Poets 16 in 1970. "The Autumn-Born in Autumn" (2008) is Matthew Mead's own selection from his poetry.

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