Poetry review – AFTER THE MIRACLE: Michael Bartholomew-Biggs admires the clarity and the intensity of Richard Meier’s poems
After the Miracle
Richard Meier
Happenstance Press
ISBN: 9781910131749
76pp £10
After the Miracle is a collection of poems of extraordinary clarity and simplicity. They are mostly quite short and yet they are full of unexpected observations, prompting reactions like Why did I never notice that before? Or not even think of it? The title poem, for instance, draws attention to a common inability to make our words rise to the occasion even when we feel deep gratitude. What after all could Lazarus say as an adequate response to being raised from the dead? And what could the poet say to the woman ‘who took away the pain/ which so long stooped and shaped me’ except to mutter platitudes ‘the way you might thank someone / for offering you some food / or holding a door open.’
A page or two later, Meier captures the pleasure – mostly I think experienced by children – of grasping something new about the external world. “Muscle Memory” describes the delights of discovering the dynamics of a Frisbee as it is launched in various ways: ‘a backhand arrowed from his checkered breast pocket’; or ‘flicked upwards, angled, from the side’. And as the boy learns to control the various trajectories
… the world falls open slightly
to show its workings, oh the joy
From dynamics we can pass to statics and the stability of trees. In “50” Meier pauses to observe and reflect upon the posture of one of the trees on his street (inventing a new adverb as he does so).
the beech
at number 50 leans
impossibly,
hypotenusely,
at forty-five (or maybe forty-three)
degrees but seems –
just going by its bark, its leaves –
fine really
…
In contrast, he explains, if a person were to lean at an angle of more than about thirteen degrees
our feet
our heels
would from the street
unpeel
In “The Heron”, Meier surprises us in a different way. He first shares his delight in discovering a park with
Yellow flag irises, peals of them
A green arched bridge across the water
…
... Giverny by the North Circular
He goes on to notice a heron ‘perched on the orange handrail’ and we expect this handrail to belong to the bridge or some other picturesque walkway … but no, it is attached to ‘a largely submerged shopping trolley’; and we are suddenly back to urban reality ‘down by the retail park’.
There is however unmixed pleasure to be found on the riverside at Wapping where – for those with eyes to spot them – there are many, many examples of driftwood carved by tides and friction into animal shapes:
This fish, for instance,
the smoothed head, grain scales, and this knot
set so precisely where the eye would be.
A middle section of the book Sketch of a Pagoda is a homage to Takuboku Ishikawa and contains twenty-five or so haiku-like pieces. These delicate poems are harder to comment on than those we have already considered. They typically have to speak for themselves and – rather like jokes – they either succeed or they don’t; and, either way, they can’t easily be explained in any but their own terms. In my view, the great majority of them do succeed and as an illustration I will simply quote some that, in different ways, particularly pleased me.
after a pint or two
with a widowed dad of three
I head home to my wife
[Local]
the sound of one hand clapping?
the wedding anniversary
of the newly widowed
[A koan solved]
the kitchen lamp
whose light I need
to see to fix it
[Order]
Returning to longer pieces, “From Memory” is a deeply-felt sequence of nine poems in memory of Maureen Meier (the poet’s mother). It begins by noting the way that, with hindsight, the onset of a person’s dementia symptoms can be identified quite clearly (‘some dates she got mixed up’). And from that moment the family has to to watch the patient’s grasp of reality spiral down and shrink into ‘ever tighter circles’. Precedent poignantly compares the unintended forgetfulness of dementia with a parent deliberately ‘failing to notice’ mistakes in a child’s piano playing. First time records the pain of hearing the words ‘They tell me you’re my son’ to which the poet responds
I do not feel so much
extinguished or redacted as
unclaimed.
And The break simply reports the awfulness of a single visit in which two contrasting sentences are uttered: ‘You want to kill me, don’t you?’ and ‘It’s been so lovely of you to come’. Foreverwear describes the last thoughtful action the poet can perform for his mother, which is to choose the right jacket for dressing her in the coffin
It’s August now, so not
one of the thicker ones.
Autumn will soon be here though
so not a thin one either.
What’s really required is ‘the one remarkable garment /…/ for all seasons and all weathers’
The last dozen or so pages take us back to slantwise observations on life which are similar to those in the first part of the book. “Agony” deals with a subject I have never before seen in a poem – the use of heatmaps to record domestic space usage.
Because of all the sleep,
the rooms that show up reddest
…
tend to be the bedrooms
Readers may care to try second guessing what colours distinguish the other areas of a home.
A much grimmer connection between heat, people and rooms is explored in “Article of Faith” which is about the fire brigade’s ‘Stay put’ policy which was totally inappropriate for the Grenfell Tower fire when flames spread up the outside of the building instead of being held back by internal fire doors. Life has many perils but sometimes ‘what gets us is / the fixed idea’.
There may be another grim link between the title poem (with its mention of extreme pain) and the penultimate one “The Pitch” which begins, shockingly
Told that I’m dying
but fuck that,
I started on my pitch
This ‘pitch’ is in fact a speech making out his case – ‘with some aplomb / and even the odd joke’ – for seeking ‘another twenty, thirty years’ of life. Unfortunately, he has to report ‘I’ve not heard back yet’.
Many authors might find it hard to follow that final line. But Meier has one more telling image to offer. It begins with a tin of red paint found ‘in the coalhole where I tend to store things.’ (I like that ‘tend to’ which suggests that the speaker is sometimes a mystery to himself.) It was only when his eyes had adjusted to the gloom that the tin ‘undressed from the darkness and appeared’. Inside it there proved to be a ‘half-drowned brush, / wild-looking after treading paint for years.’ And now, after that intriguingly phrased but mundane build-up, Meier makes an astonishing association with a universal symbol of mortality
… what I thought of as I fished it out to use it,
was the heart, the remarkable heart.
My first reading of this book was done within a single afternoon. It offers no puzzles, no enigmas, no self-conscious tricks of form or cleverly oblique references. At times it expresses light curiosity, even playfulness and elsewhere it addresses the heaviest of experiences; and it does both with grace and clarity. I don’t necessarily wish that all poetry books were so straightforward; but I am very glad this one is.
Oct 14 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Richard Meier
Poetry review – AFTER THE MIRACLE: Michael Bartholomew-Biggs admires the clarity and the intensity of Richard Meier’s poems
After the Miracle is a collection of poems of extraordinary clarity and simplicity. They are mostly quite short and yet they are full of unexpected observations, prompting reactions like Why did I never notice that before? Or not even think of it? The title poem, for instance, draws attention to a common inability to make our words rise to the occasion even when we feel deep gratitude. What after all could Lazarus say as an adequate response to being raised from the dead? And what could the poet say to the woman ‘who took away the pain/ which so long stooped and shaped me’ except to mutter platitudes ‘the way you might thank someone / for offering you some food / or holding a door open.’
A page or two later, Meier captures the pleasure – mostly I think experienced by children – of grasping something new about the external world. “Muscle Memory” describes the delights of discovering the dynamics of a Frisbee as it is launched in various ways: ‘a backhand arrowed from his checkered breast pocket’; or ‘flicked upwards, angled, from the side’. And as the boy learns to control the various trajectories
From dynamics we can pass to statics and the stability of trees. In “50” Meier pauses to observe and reflect upon the posture of one of the trees on his street (inventing a new adverb as he does so).
In contrast, he explains, if a person were to lean at an angle of more than about thirteen degrees
In “The Heron”, Meier surprises us in a different way. He first shares his delight in discovering a park with
He goes on to notice a heron ‘perched on the orange handrail’ and we expect this handrail to belong to the bridge or some other picturesque walkway … but no, it is attached to ‘a largely submerged shopping trolley’; and we are suddenly back to urban reality ‘down by the retail park’.
There is however unmixed pleasure to be found on the riverside at Wapping where – for those with eyes to spot them – there are many, many examples of driftwood carved by tides and friction into animal shapes:
A middle section of the book Sketch of a Pagoda is a homage to Takuboku Ishikawa and contains twenty-five or so haiku-like pieces. These delicate poems are harder to comment on than those we have already considered. They typically have to speak for themselves and – rather like jokes – they either succeed or they don’t; and, either way, they can’t easily be explained in any but their own terms. In my view, the great majority of them do succeed and as an illustration I will simply quote some that, in different ways, particularly pleased me.
Returning to longer pieces, “From Memory” is a deeply-felt sequence of nine poems in memory of Maureen Meier (the poet’s mother). It begins by noting the way that, with hindsight, the onset of a person’s dementia symptoms can be identified quite clearly (‘some dates she got mixed up’). And from that moment the family has to to watch the patient’s grasp of reality spiral down and shrink into ‘ever tighter circles’. Precedent poignantly compares the unintended forgetfulness of dementia with a parent deliberately ‘failing to notice’ mistakes in a child’s piano playing. First time records the pain of hearing the words ‘They tell me you’re my son’ to which the poet responds
And The break simply reports the awfulness of a single visit in which two contrasting sentences are uttered: ‘You want to kill me, don’t you?’ and ‘It’s been so lovely of you to come’. Foreverwear describes the last thoughtful action the poet can perform for his mother, which is to choose the right jacket for dressing her in the coffin
What’s really required is ‘the one remarkable garment /…/ for all seasons and all weathers’
The last dozen or so pages take us back to slantwise observations on life which are similar to those in the first part of the book. “Agony” deals with a subject I have never before seen in a poem – the use of heatmaps to record domestic space usage.
Readers may care to try second guessing what colours distinguish the other areas of a home.
A much grimmer connection between heat, people and rooms is explored in “Article of Faith” which is about the fire brigade’s ‘Stay put’ policy which was totally inappropriate for the Grenfell Tower fire when flames spread up the outside of the building instead of being held back by internal fire doors. Life has many perils but sometimes ‘what gets us is / the fixed idea’.
There may be another grim link between the title poem (with its mention of extreme pain) and the penultimate one “The Pitch” which begins, shockingly
This ‘pitch’ is in fact a speech making out his case – ‘with some aplomb / and even the odd joke’ – for seeking ‘another twenty, thirty years’ of life. Unfortunately, he has to report ‘I’ve not heard back yet’.
Many authors might find it hard to follow that final line. But Meier has one more telling image to offer. It begins with a tin of red paint found ‘in the coalhole where I tend to store things.’ (I like that ‘tend to’ which suggests that the speaker is sometimes a mystery to himself.) It was only when his eyes had adjusted to the gloom that the tin ‘undressed from the darkness and appeared’. Inside it there proved to be a ‘half-drowned brush, / wild-looking after treading paint for years.’ And now, after that intriguingly phrased but mundane build-up, Meier makes an astonishing association with a universal symbol of mortality
My first reading of this book was done within a single afternoon. It offers no puzzles, no enigmas, no self-conscious tricks of form or cleverly oblique references. At times it expresses light curiosity, even playfulness and elsewhere it addresses the heaviest of experiences; and it does both with grace and clarity. I don’t necessarily wish that all poetry books were so straightforward; but I am very glad this one is.