A Clearing

First edition of A Clearing by Raymond Meeks (2008)

First impression

Large format hardback in fine condition

This is an artist proof

Signed by Raymond Meeks to copyright page

Some very minor shelfwear to edge of boards

No internal markings

Dust jacket in removable protective sleeve

About A Clearing

Following up his richly emotive debut collection, Ray Meeks expands the range of his vision with equally stunning technique, suggesting visual rhymes between the sentient and the inanimate, between stratigraphic lines and telephone wires, between a bulldozer’s tread marks and a boy’s ribcage. Whereas his earlier book, Sound of Summer Running, invited us inward, into the expressive interiors of family and place, a Clearing presents us with a world that averts its face, a world we haven’t yet learned to read, where meaning still seems to be gathering itself, where verticality is a sign of defiance. Figures in the landscape appear so isolated, they take on mythic force. The sky is resistant as eyes turned back in a head. Meeks’s camera records the naked geological and human assertion of presence against the flattening insistence of time, erosion, and poverty. In a Clearing, the world speaks itself in a language of origins: stone and child and woman and man cry out from elemental silence, Look, I am here