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 the modern masters and their obsessive focus on uncomfortable truths, are mordantly witty as they confront life and death with eyes wide open. Mead is a poet who, once read, is not forgotten.   Matthew Mead was born in Slapton, Buckinghamshire, in 1924. He served in the British army from 1942 to 1947, including three years in India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Singapore. He has lived in Germany since 1962 and, with his wife Ruth, has translated many German poets, including Johannes Bobrowski, Heinz Winfried Sabais and Nelly Sachs. He was a Penguin Modern Poet in 1970. Walking Out of the World is the fifth collection of his own poems.