Missing Persons

Just because I neither smiled nor spoke –
Letting you pass me with the saluting glance
Which any attractive woman can take as tribute –
Don’t think that I didn’t know you
Or that you – staring ahead,
Recognition in the corner of an eye –
Did not know me.

I was in love with you at the age of ten and kept silent.
Your hair was yellower then and longer,
You wore prettier dresses than most of the girls.
Either we share an excellent memory for faces
Or ghosts inhabit the flesh.
 

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 collections of poetry. As he once wrote, ‘I have tried not to avoid what has happened in poetry and psycho-politics during this [20th] century.’

In his essay which is appended to this collection, Dick Davis analyses the special and uncommon qualities of Mead’s poetry, concluding ‘His tone is unmistakable, and once encountered it is never forgotten.’