The Writers of Wales Database

JORDAN, MEIRION

Audiovisual footage available here and here

Meirion Jordan was born in 1985 in Swansea, Wales. He read mathematics at Somerville College, Oxford, and has just finished an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. He won the Newdigate Prize in 2007 and has been published in a number of magazines, including Poetry Wales, the TLS and Gallous. He is influenced by poets David Constantine, Andrew Waterhouse, Gillian Clarke, Geoffrey Hill, Byzantine & mediaeval art, music and science fiction. Meirion read from his debut poetry collection Moonrise (Seren, 2008) at the 2008 Academi Bay Lit Festival and the 2008 Dylan Thomas Festival. Moonrise made the shortlist for the 2009 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. 

His latest collection, the 2009 Norfolk Commission Winner Strangers Hall (Gatehouse Press, 2009), is the poetic exploration of the history of Norwich based on the museum at Strangers Hall. Meirion is a Member of Academi.

Reviews:
With respect to Moonrise (Seren, 2008) 

"…It is rare to come across a first collection as assured as this, It has surpassed intelligence, learning, wit, a very fine ear, and a kind of playfulness that has a properly serious core. One would be tempted to call it impeccable did that not sound like a curse…"
George Szirtes 

"…Meirion Jordan is a young poet blessed with a vibrant exploring energy and an innate sense of a poem’s natural shape and cadences. There is a commendable intelligence and rich variety in his work, as it explores the interwoven attraction of futile histories, impossible alternative worlds and, at its heart, the real and finally most surprising world…"
John Fuller

With respect to Strangers Hall (Gatehouse Press, 2009)

"…intelligent poems written with a historian's eye and a very finely tuned ear…"
Helen Ivory


Selected Publications:
Moonrise (Seren, 2008) 
Strangers Hall (Gatehouse Press, 2009)



Moonrise (Seren, 2008) 

This new collection introduces us to a lively and provocative young poet. From the lyrical opening of ’Calculus’ where the protagonist throws ’pebbles at the spinning moon’, we find a vivid array  of subjects, with deft thumbnail portraits like ’Girl on a motorbike in India’ and ’The astronomer’s wife’, and sharp satires on modern living as in ’The Nuclear Disaster Appreciation Society’ where "we love to watch the palm trees beating in the thorium breeze".

Like a cross between Under Milk Wood and a J.G. Ballard novel, ’The new World’ envisions a post-global-warming Wales where a polyglot population is swamped by tropical vegetation. Another apocalyptic scenario prevails in ’Pirate music’ in which typical binge-drinking weekend unravels as one of Dante’s Circles of Hell.

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