Matthew Mead began publishing his poetry in the 1960s. By then he had, as Peter Riley noted, "located a sense of poetry for which he drew widely from Anglo-American writing, avoiding any programmes of allegiance". Over the years he has published five...

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 th...

Matthew Mead's third collection of verse follows "Identities" (1967) and "The Administration of Things" (1970). In his own words, his is "a quiet voice for quiet rooms" – but the voice is distinct and compels attention. As Richard Holmes wrote of his...

Matthew Mead's second collection of poems will hold the attention of all who found in his "Identities" (1967) an exciting consummation of his concern with "our time", with poetic experiment, and with "the single poetic theme". "His poems speak soberl...