The Golden Mean

After the success of Grain - shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize - John Glenday returns with The Golden Mean. Glenday's mastery of the short translucent lyric and his unashamed and direct engagement with matters of the spirit, love, human nature and physical law, means he can sometimes read as a Spanish or East European poet in immaculate translation. Yet Glenday's voice is also local and intimate, and his poetry - for all its apparently weightless and aerodynamic grace - is also playful, experimental and often highly surreal. The Golden Mean takes an elemental focus on the properties of light, air, water and stone; the cycles of day and night; the nature of name and text, memory and ghost; but from these deceptively simple themes, Glenday again and again conjures poetry of immense nuance and sophistication, and of immaculately judged proportion and weight. The Golden Mean shows one of our greatest poetic craftsmen at the very height of his powers.John Glenday was born in Broughty Ferry in 1952. His first collection, The Apple Ghost, won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and his second, Undark, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Grain was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Ted Hughes Award.