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Gillian ClarkeGillian Clarke
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Critical perspective
BiographyGillian Clarke was born in Cardiff, Wales, and now lives with her family on a smallholding in Ceredigion.
She has written books for children, including The Animal Wall: and other poems (1999), Owain Glyn Dwr 1400-2000 (2000) and One Moonlit Night (1991), the latter being translations from the Welsh of traditional stories by T. Llew Jones. She has also written for stage, television and radio, several radio plays and poems being broadcast by the BBC.
Gillian Clarke has published several collections of poetry including Letter From a Far Country (1982); Letting in the Rumour (1989); The King of Britain's Daughter (1993); and Five Fields (1998). The latest three collections have all been Poetry Book Society Recommendations.
She is President of Ty Newydd, the Writer's Centre in North Wales which she co-founded in 1990, and teaches on the M.Phil Writing Course at the University of Glamorgan. She has travelled widely giving poetry readings and lectures, and her work has been translated into ten languages.
Gillian Clarke's most recent poetry collection is A Recipe for Water (2009). In 2008 she published a book of prose, including a journal of the writer's year, entitled At The Source.
Genres (in alphabetical order)Fiction, Poetry, Radio drama, Translation
BibliographySnow on the Mountain Christopher Davies, 1971 The Sundial Gomer, 1978 Letter from a Far Country Carcanet, 1982 Selected Poems Carcanet, 1985 Letting in the Rumour Carcanet, 1989 One Moonlit Night (adaptator and translator; illustrated by Jac Jones) Gomer, 1991 The King of Britain's Daughter Carcanet, 1993 Cell Angel (translations) Bloodaxe, 1996 I Can Move the Sea: 100 poems by children (selector; illustrated by Jenny Fell) Gomer, 1996 The Whispering Room: Haunted Poems (selector; illustrated by Justin Todd) Kingfisher Books, 1996 Collected Poems Carcanet, 1997 Banc Siôn Cwilt: A Local Habitation and a Name (illustrated by Margaret Merritt) Gregynog Press, 1998 Five Fields Carcanet, 1998 The Animal Wall: and other poems (illustrated by Karen Pearce) Gomer, 1999 Bioverse (edited by Andrew Sclater; includes poems by Gillian Clarke) HarperCollins, 2000 Magpies (including short stories by Gillian Clarke: 'The Blue Man'; 'A Field of Hay'; 'Honey') Gomer8, 2000 Nine Green Gardens (illustrated, colour photographs) Gomer, 2000 Owain Glyn Dwr 1400-2000 (pictures by Margaret Jones; English poems by Gillian Clarke) National Library of Wales, 2000 Making the Beds for the Dead Carcanet, 2004 At The Source Carcanet, 2008 A Recipe for Water Carcanet, 2009
Critical PerspectiveInheriting the mantle from the late R.S. Thomas, Gillian Clarke is no doubt the best loved of current Welsh poets. Accessibility, humanity, and deep feeling characterize her work, which is by turns lyrical or bleak in observing landscapes and ordinary family lives in Wales. She is actually an Anglo-Welsh writer, her poems being written in English but showing an emotional attachment to the Welsh language and culture. She edited the Anglo-Welsh Review from 1975 to 1984, and has an ongoing involvement with Ty Newydd, the creative writing centre that she co-founded in North Wales. She is also a writer for children, selecting the poetry anthologies I Can Move the Sea: 100 Poems by Children (1996) and The Whispering Room: Haunted Poems (1996). She attracts an audience well beyond Wales and, for instance, was Poet-in-Residence at the Ledbury Festival during July 2005, offering poetry workshops and tuition.
Clarke is, in a sense, a deeply traditional poet: her abiding themes often involve beautiful descriptions of animals, birds, and farming life, amid the Welsh countryside. Her perhaps best-known long poem, ‘Letter from a Far Country’, is richly informed by her own family history, women’s roles and domestic duties centering around children. Yet she sets this traditionalism alongside awareness of social changes and politics, particularly in poems reflecting upon Bosnia and the Gulf wars. Her ability to bring small-scale personal experiences to bear upon larger views is characteristic, as in ‘No Hands’, when low-flying planes over her fields are practising for war. In ‘The Field Mouse’, ‘far from the radio’s terrible news, / we cut the hay’, children find a crushed mouse, and the poet dreams about her neighbour ‘turned stranger, wounding my land with stones’. Clarke uses the celebratory note as much as the elegiac. But Making the Beds for the Dead (2004), is more pessimistic in tone, with a sequence memorializing the 2001 ‘Foot and Mouth’ epidemic and its disastrous effect upon Welsh hill farmers.
By her own account, the title poem of her debut collection, The Sundial (1978), was the first poem she had written since schooldays. It portrays her young son Owain, restless during the night, and the next day making a sundial in the garden. Her early work reflects upon a farming landscape ‘where full barns count as much as poetry’, and Combine Harvesters rest only on a Sunday, seen as ‘still and powerful / As a ladybird resting between flight’. There are ‘the smells of moist / Earth and sheep’s wool’, and signs of mortality throughout: a vixen is hanging from a tree, and ‘Sheep’s Skulls’ seem as beautiful ‘as a leaf’s skeleton / or derelict shell’. But there is always rebirth: ‘Hot and slippery, the scalding/ Baby came, and the cow stood up’ (‘Birth’). Meanwhile, the old mining industries are in decline. Snow makes the slag tips appear ‘like cones of sugar spun / By the pit wheels’. It has walls a thousand years old, yet this is a region undergoing change: ‘Only the rooted things stayed / … Language / Crumbles to wind and bird-call’ (‘Clywedog’).
With Letter from a Far Country (1982), Clarke really found her stride, especially in the lengthy title poem, written for radio, about the ‘far country’ of ancestral memory and childhood, which she has described as ‘an essay on roots and responsibilities’. Women are at the heart of this life; even the landscape is ‘essentially feminine’, and it ‘collects conversations / as carefully as a bucket / gives them back in concert / with a wood of birdsong’. Elsewhere in the book, the seasonal round of harvesting takes place (‘storing gold as nights turn chill’), and a myriad of wild and farming creatures are recorded, such as a ‘Heron at Port Talbot’, and the slow, rolling mass of a Friesian bull: ‘his eyes / surface like fish bellies’. On the human scale, rural isolation and depression is the implicit theme of a number of poems, notably ‘Suicide on Pentwyn Bridge’, but the poet also looks further abroad, with ‘A Journal from France’.
Following volumes of selected and collected poems, Five Fields (1998) took shape following Clarke’s residency at the Bridgewater Hall, a concert venue in Manchester, during May 1997. It is one of her best collections, elegiac and consolatory by turns and written with great assurance. It opens with her usual farming scenes, when this farmer-poet assists at the delivery of lambs: ‘in my hand a sodden head, the slippery pebbles / of hooves’ (‘Ark’). But ‘A Difficult Birth, Easter 1998’ brings together an old ewe giving birth with an account of the Northern Ireland peace negotiations between parties ‘exhausted, tamed by pain’, in ‘a cradling that might have been a death’. The book is intensely personal, elegizing her mother’s life and death, and returning to childhood memories of the war in ‘Under the Stairs’ and ‘The Musical Box’. Responding to the Bridgewater Hall as a place for music, Clarke typically refers back to her own farm: ‘I know a gate between fields / that sings five notes in the wind, / a scale or a random air’ (‘Auditorium’). Her imagination is most fully released when it returns to rural Wales in ‘Hafod’, a marvellous evocation of a ruined 18th century house and garden. It observes that ‘the idea of a house is stronger / than walls, a fallen roof, temple and bridge’, and summons up its former inhabitants, with ‘the picturesque scene’ that Turner painted, and that left Coleridge astonished ‘by a glimpse of Xanadu’.
By contrast, Making the Beds for the Dead necessarily restricts its sense of arcadia. It ends by invoking the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, and in ‘The Night War Broke’, a pyramid of fruit on a lorry ‘bumping north’ on the Baghdad road is ‘piled like skulls’. Death indeed predominates, with elegies for R. S. Thomas, and a notable one for Ted Hughes: ‘the fisherman waits. His line is cast / … the line that arcs from air to shore is art’ (‘The Fisherman’). The title sequence must rank among her most emotionally charged work, as it follows the depredations of the ‘Foot and Mouth’ outbreak. ‘First the animals lost their voices’, it states, ‘then the people’ (‘Silence’). The virus ‘travels like loose talk, / on the tongue, on the hoof, / on the air, word of mouth, / faster than breathing’ (‘On the Move’). We are brought up close to the official policy of slaughtering animals, despite resistance to the ministry vets. A lamb, ‘quiet for the needle’, is put down, and farm animals, ‘stiff-legged as chairs’, burn like ‘old furniture on a bonfire’. In this book, Gillian Clarke’s engagement with her farming community becomes part of a wider view of global threats from disease and war. But, as always, she finds consolations too – in a series of poems about gardens, and in continuing births, ‘where the future believes in itself’.
Dr Jules Smith, 2004
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