Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Born in Cardiff, Gillian Clarke is a poet, playwright, editor, broadcaster, lecturer and translator (from Welsh). She edited the Anglo-Welsh Review from 1975 to 1984, and has taught creative writing in primary and secondary schools and at university level. She is president of Ty Newydd, the writers' centre in North Wales which she co-founded in 1990. Since 1994 she has been a tutor in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan. Her poetry is studied by GCSE and A Level students throughout Britain. She has given poetry readings and lectures in Europe and the United States, and her work has been translated into ten languages. She has a daughter and two sons, and now lives with her architect husband on a smallholding in Ceredigion, Wales, where they raise a small flock of sheep, and care for the land according to organic and conservation practice. Gillian Clarke was National Poet of Wales 2008 - 2015. Carcanet has published her Selected Poems (1985), Letting in the Rumour (1989, Poetry Book Society Recommendation), The King of Britain's Daughter (1993), Collected Poems (1997), Five Fields (1998) and Making the Beds for the Dead (2004). Listen to Gillian in conversation with Nadia Kingsley on the Fair Acre Press DIVERSIFLY podcastabout her writing process, what poetry is, and the Welsh language.<b>Reviewed in <i>Planet</i> by Anne Cluysenaar</b><br />
This is a richly varied collection, remarkable both for its sense of vast perspectives within immediate (often homely) experience and its visceral evocation of current events.The role of art in our lives is another recurring theme, from the first poem, remembering the childhood impact of words and images in a Holy Bible, to the last, which imagines that, after some planetary flood (floods haunt this collection), the first colour to return "will be gold / one dip from Bellini's brush, / <i>Cinquecento<i> nativities..."</i></i>
<b>Reviewed by David Morley in The <i>Guardian</i>, 13th November 2004</b><br />
All Clarke's books to date have an individual architecture in selection and order, one that requires her readers to grasp the book as a conceptual, even a musical whole.What we have here is no random collection.If you stand back from <i>Making the Beds for the Dead</i> you can spy an unusual and ambitious structure: eight "invisible" sections, some of which are self-contained sequences.The first opens with key motifs of alertness to language, and awareness of war, with the poem "In the Beginning" subtitled "on her 7th birthday".It's set during the final years of the second world war, and circles an image of "a desert land at war" and her own artistic awakening through the noise and imagery of the language of the King James Bible:<br />
I see it all in colour, a girl my age<br />
two thousand years ago, or sixty years<br />
or now in a desert land at war, squatting<br />
among the sheaves, arms raised,<br />
threshing grain with a flail.<br />
Threshing with a flail.That's it.Words<br />
from another language, a narrative of spells<br />
in difficult columns on those moth-thin pages,<br />
words to thrill the heart with a strange music,<br />
words like flail, and wilderness,<br />
and in the beginning.<br />
The motifs of desert conflict, and the Iraq war, recur throughout the book, even within an important sequence about the foot and mouth epidemic, the title poem.In this piece she makes an unforced and intellectually challenging connection between the suffering of Iraq and the suffering felt in rural communities of Wales.Not only that, but Clarke also uses what appears to be live prose accounts by rural workers giving their response to the foot and mouth crisis.These plain and moving accounts are snapped into, or traced into, lines within the sequence, and give it, and them, a great deal of dignity and sense of first witness, as in "Hywel's story":<br />
<i>"The 60s.I was out with a gun after rabbits, or a fox.<br />
I walked to the end of the wood real quiet.I looked over the fence<br />
at that secret field between the two woods.I was looking for mushrooms.<br />
Something wrong with those cattle.They were lying down, standing,<br />
any old how, alone facing the fence, heads down, not grazing.<br />
Not together all one way like when it's going to rain."</i><br />
This makes for honest scrutiny.One of the reasons manifest honesty can thrive in such a work, rather than just look swiped, is because Clarke provides such a strong structure to the whole sequence and book.It's the underpinnings provided by repeated design; there is a governing music to it all, a large patterning and a real eye for detail, and the "sound" of concision:<br />
With block and tackle, grappling iron, axe,<br />
they'd lift the lid off the lake.In a rare year<br />
an acre could yield a thousand tons.<br />
This kind ofmacro-architecture, familiar to any composer of music, taken together with the symphonic arc of the book, is entirely convincing and extremely impressive, but resists easygoing extraction, or excision for that matter.I'd urge you to defy traditional poetry-reading conduct ("let's dip into the book wherever") and instead walk the order of her mind as you would an expert garden.Gardens are total compositions; so is a book like this.Read her as a whole.Scant service is done to the readers of Gillian Clarke if they are guided towards the sound of a single birdcall while ignoring the involved orchestration of the entire chorus.
<b>John Scrivener, <i>The Reader</i>, Issue 17, Spring 2005<br />
Where the Future Believes in Itself</b><br />
Straightaway in this new collection of poems by Gillian Clarke images of close-fitting accuracy arrest your attention: you're made to feel the 'moth-thin pages' of a Bible, or see a woman who, cutting into an apple, 'peels the fruit in a single / ringlet of skin': how exactly this gives us that coil of peel, at once tense and lolling (the single/ringlet repetition mimicking the repeating curls). Then later in the volume comes the little lamb 'an hour old, still damp and yolky' - again, how good 'yolky' is, not just for the slick of its fleece, but somehow for its wonky unsteadiness too, 'alive and up on trembling legs'. The poet's fidelity to the actual, which is a respect for the look and feel and smell of things (we have, like the lamb, to 'learn grass'), serves as an assurance to us, a baseline of trust, as does her willingness to alertly relax into the consciously humdrum, in the street maybe:<br />
with the train drumming the viaduct<br />
traffic turning up at the junction<br />
We need the baseline of what we can make sure of, as does the poet herself, against the collection's background of freak floods and the scourge of foot and mouth, seen close up by the writer, who lives in rural Wales, as well as of larger disorders (the twin towers, the Iraq war, El Nino) which make the times seem out of joint. The fine poem 'The Flood Diary' blends to great effect personal experience and what is seem on television - she is truthful about the diverse and mediated ways in which we receive our impressions - while the title sequence 'Making the Beds for the Dead' traces the nightmarish progress of the foot and mouth virus through stories at first hypothetical, mythological even, but drawing closer to home, to your neighbours' animals, to your own, and the dreaded '...call at the door / of strangers dressed to kill'. If the poems dealing with 'nine eleven' and the Iraq war seem, to me anyway, to have less intensity of poetic life it's not because the attitudes they express is not decent and understandable, nor that they lack accomplishment, but rather, I think, that they treat of matters too remote, and lack this poet's touchstone of the real: the near at hand. The poem on the death of a specially-loved sheep ('"never name them", they warned') is more moving than that on the twin towers, not, of course, because more 'important' on some abstract scale but because closer and offering a more apprehensible form for sorrow.<br />
Four sequences reprinted here originated in commissioned work, where we may be ready for bald patches, but these - especially 'The Stone Poems' and 'The Middleton Poems' - keep coming alive; here is a beautifully arrived-at moment of open reverie from 'Hay' in the 'Stone Poems' series:<br />
Speaking of stone on a day like this,<br />
the silence, the heat, the hay-days,<br />
when the slates creak in the sun,<br />
the flags are too hot for the dog<br />
and the field's dried to a thin song<br />
of seeds and grasshoppers,<br />
yellow rattle, harebells, the litany of grass<br />
The wings and songs of birds or pianos feel threatened in this collection. To take flight is dangerous: the poet is too aware of what 'can teach you gravity', and air is treacherous for those who<br />
fall<br />
like leaves, rubble, dust,<br />
limbs akimbo on the air<br />
as if arms could be wings<br />
Fire and water are treacherous too in the time of floods and funeral pyres; only earth, or better still stone, is reliable, or water so frozen you can 'sever the tangled locks of waterfalls'. There may be safety in that fixity, and 'beasts stand as if stillness might rescue them'. This isn't just a temporary reaction; there is something more permanent in the poet's sense of ice 'reminding water / of the earth it came from'. It comes naturally to her to, so to speak, follow the blackbird's song back to its (proximate) source, to the 'bead of rain / in its throat'. The throat, the root, the dumb record of stone and fossil represent to the poet a kind of guarantee, perhaps because the future can sometimes more surely be felt in beginnings, as in the lovely poem 'Mother Tongue':<br />
You'd hardly call it a nest,<br />
Just a scrape in the stones,<br />
but she's all of a dither<br />
warning the wind and sky<br />
with her desperate cries.<br />
If we walk away<br />
she'll come home quiet<br />
to the warm brown pebble<br />
with its cargo of blood and hunger,<br />
where the future believes in itself,<br />
and the beat of the sea<br />
is the pulse of a blind<br />
helmeted embryo afloat<br />
in the twilight of an egg,<br />
learning the language.<br />
The poet seems to present us here with the claim, finally inscrutable, of life itself.
<b> Richard Poole, <i>New Welsh Review</i>, volume 67, spring 2005</b><br />
Gillian Clarke's new collection is made up of five sequences and twenty-seven poems split into three unequal groups. Her first book, a Triskel pamphlet entitled <i>Snow on the Mountain</i>, came out in 1971 and, after reading <i>Making the Beds for the Dead</i>, I dug out my copy. There were her characteristic early themes: domestic life, rural life, personal relationships, landscape, the beauty and brutality of nature. There too were her characteristic strengths: fluency, lucidity and a directness and simplicity of utterance that could at need generate a luminous sense of mystery.<br />
Well, her new book still displays these themes and qualities, but poets must move on if they are to continue to write, and Clarke has moved on. <i>Making the Beds for the Dead</i> engages with both human and geological history, and is also deeply marked by contemporary events. There was, on occasion, disturbance in <i>Snow on the Mountain</i>, but it was contained within the realms of the personal. Now it has broken out to infect everything, threatening 'the way things are, / shifting the very ground /beneath our feet.' ('Marsh Fritillary'). At home there was the foot and mouth epidemic of 2001, abroad there was 9.11 and (still is) war in Iraq, while everywhere looms the imminence of ecological meltdown.<br />
The opening group of ten poems contains some of the most attractive writing in the book. In 'In the Beginning' the poet recalls the excitement of being given an illustrated copy of the Bible on her seventh birthday, and the way simple but mysterious words took hold of her imagination:<br />
words to thrill the heart with a strange music,<br />
words like flail, and wilderness<br />
and in the beginning.<br />
'A Woman Sleeping at a Table' uses Vermeer's painting as a jumping-off point. This is the mid-seventeenth century, and science and exploration are opening up the world. Humanity has lost its innocence, and Clarke imagines the woman waking and peeling an apple, symbol of the Fall:<br />
Undressed to its equator<br />
it is half moonlight.<br />
Then all white, naked, whole,<br />
she slices to the star-heart<br />
for the four quarters of the moon.<br />
Four Sequences follow this first group: 'The Stone Poems' (ten poems), 'The Middleton Poems' (seven), 'The Physicians of Myddfai' (three) and 'Nine Green Gardens'. These are poems for whose material the poet has gone quarrying, and they wear their research on their sleeve. Not infrequently I felt that I was being fed information, even structured in a quasi-pedagogical manner, and I recalled Keats' dislike of poems that have designs upon us. 'The Stone Poems' is a trek through geological areas, and while Clarke wants us to share her awe at the big numbers she lays on us, her writing sometimes feels uncharacteristically clumsy. Experience in her best work is internalised and transformed, but the raw material of these sequences often seems undigested and external. This can be the case even within a poem. Compare the declension in intensity, the shift from poise to rhythmic flatness, in these stanzas from 'Plumbing':<br />
A lemon bloomed with frost,<br />
hollowed and filled with sweet snow.<br />
A bowl of ice and Muscat grapes.<br />
Breath on a glass of wine.<br />
[...]<br />
He piped water to his gate for public use,<br />
to save the rural poor from filth and fevers,<br />
a hundred years ahead of his time devised,<br />
a water system for Carmarthen.<br />
Is the comma after 'devised', one wonders, a misprint or a symptom?<br />
<i>Making the Beds for the Dead</i> sometimes also has facts to convey, but its urgency and power derive from personal disturbance, so that if at times its writing is strained, strain is a sign of authenticity. Most of the poems refer to the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001, when Clarke's own holding was threatened, and they are by turns grim, bitter, angry, detached. Then, towards the end, the reader's surprised by a sudden expansion as international disaster breaks like a tidal wave over home concerns. It takes a very good poet to rise to the imaginative challenge of the images of 9/11 imprinted on us all, but Clarke does it in 'The Fall':<br />
We watched them fall<br />
like leaves, rubble, dust,<br />
limbs akimbo on the air<br />
as if arms could be wings,<br />
as if men and women could be angels...<br />
The enormity of this 'second fall from grace' both picks up the imagery of 'A Woman Sleeping at a Table' and reverberates through the strong group of five poems that closes the book. Here is war, here is the helplessness we all feel in the face of current world events, here is ecological meltdown: 'if civilisation drowns...' What a long way Clarke has travelled since her early Triskel collection 'In a Garden':<br />
We have a future and are not shadow people.<br />
The moving stream, the swelling bud, nothing<br />
can halt.
<b>Tim Liardet, <i>North</i> magazine, issue 36, Summer 2005</b><br />
Gillian Clarke's <i>Making the Beds for the Dead</i> continues with more of what we expect from her: the clarity of her narrative drive, the acute observation of the natural world. 'A Woman Sleeping at a Table', 'The Piano' and 'Woman Washing her Hair', however, strive way beyond this, and possibly the best poem in the book is 'Stranger on a Train', a chilling update on Hardy's 'Faint Heart in a Railway Carriage', brilliantly focusing a post-millenial sense of menace and shifted expectation: 'A seaman, maybe. A soldier. Nothing odd, / but his glittering straightahead stare. / He didn't once look at the perfect morning.' But the book takes off when we arrive at the title sequence which charts the details of the Foot and Mouth crisis on 2001. To all the poems she has written over the years which draw upon a kind of post-Hughesian epic appreciation of nature must be added this new unadorned, plain-speaking evocation of men and animals locked together in endurance:<br />
First the animals lost their voices,<br />
then the people.<br />
We couldn't speak<br />
We couldn't hold each other.<br />
Words drowned in a howl of wind,<br />
in the howl of a man in a hollow barn.<br />
('Silence, February 2001')<br />
The Foot and Mouth poems are poems of witness, the authentications of one who knows how the virus '...travels like loose talk, / on the tongue, on the hoof, / on the air, word of mouth, / faster than breathing.' ('On the Move'). The best of them are outstandingly good, vivid with their own intensifiers and breed a new kind of language for Clarke which is infused with muted anger, as in 'Plague', part of the title sequence: 'A pedigree Holstein with a fancy name / hangs, grotesque from the JCB hook / against an inferno of flame and smoke.'
<b>Elizabeth Burns, <i>Orbis</i> magazine, Autumn 2004</b><br />
At the beginning is a poem about a Vermeer painting, where a woman peels an apple and from it learns about the universe: 'The apple turns / under fixed stars, / Her knife cuts into the Pole...' This image of the held, particular object linked with something far larger seems an apt one for the actual book, because although it begins in familiar Clarke territory, the Welsh landscape, with its 'drum and dither of wild bees', and, after haymaking, 'every last grass and fallen flower of the field / by nightfall cooling under the moon', it widens to encompass the violent, damaged world of the 21st century.<br />
It opens with poems about the past, with lovely elegies for RS Thomas and for Ted Hughes, and a sequence on the ancient, geological basis of the landscape, where 'Slate', for example, is 'bruised purple by so much time, / a history book, its pages open / for the text of lichens and weather.' But gradually the poems become more unsettling. Land is flooded, and there's a smashed nest of adders, a car crash, a train crash, a remembered howl of grief like 'a rucksack of sorrow / on your shoulder'...then we're plunged into the title sequence on Foot and Mouth, into September 11th and the war in Iraq.<br />
...In the penultimate poem, 'Aftermath', Clarke writes of 'dust settling on a shaken world' and of 'the peeled skull / of a frog, like the husk of a planet', and it's as if by the end of the book, the poet herself, raw and 'peeled' is readjusting to 'this shaken world'. But her voice emerges through it as a strongly humane one, bardic and prophetic, writing as witness to destruction and enduring beauty.
<b>Belinda Cooke, <i>Poetry Ireland Review</i>, Issue 86<br />
Something Endures</b><br />
In <i>Making Beds for the Dead</i>, Gillian Clarke begins with an explanation of the nature of creativity, of language in particular, a process in which she draws on associations with friends past and present.The collection then divides into a number of sequences triggered by a Commission for Andrew Slater's anthology, <i>Bioverse: Poems for the National Botanical Garden of Wales</i>, and a further commissioned sequence 'Nine Green Gardens', celebrating the Aberglasne Gardens, Carmarthenshire.Subsequent poems continue to reinforce her trademark rural theme, the regenerative qualities of which are brought sharply to the fore by the shock of contemporary events - the Twin Towers, the devastating effect of Foot and Mouth disease and disastrous flooding.Speaking as one who still, navvely perhaps, regards the poem as the result of some form of inspiration, I was curious to see how well these commissioned poems would stand up against the rest of the collection.<br />
The opening ten poems group together as works about art and artists for the most part, paying tribute to Ted Hughes, R S Thomas and Anne Stevenson, among others.The marvellous opening poem, 'In the Beginning', provides us with what is typical of her writing, a physical immediacy comparable with Heaney's early work, the concrete detail that provides an eureka-like sensation - <i>Yes, that's exactly what it's like</i>; as when she describes her first bible's 'soft black leather cover / tissue pages edged in gold' and its 'moth-thin pages'.'Mother Tongue' is deceptively simple, with the description of an egg as a 'warm brown pebble' transforming into an extended metaphor for the birth of a language and the affirmation of nature's continuity with the 'cargo of blood and hunger / where the future believes in itself'.The cleverness of her imagery is that the poem is both the birth of the egg and of language.'The Poet's Ear', with its repetition of 'Nothing to do / with...', focuses mainly on what the poem isn't, explaining ultimately that it's 'The heart / listening to the line's perfect pitch.'In 'The Fisherman', a poem dedicated to Hughes, we can forgive the rather obvious analogies with 'The Thought-Fox' because of the exactitude of 'the moon is a stone / rolled and tumbled in the river's grief.'Then there is the beautifully pared-down language used to describe the haunting impact of Thomas's death, in 'RS':<br />
And - again with acute observation - in 'The Painter' she praises the skill of the artist Mary Lloyd-Jones:<br />
She dips her brush in sky,<br />
in rain, in story<br />
and comes up with who we are<br />
The brush unloads its cloud in a jar<br />
to take its place with stratocumulus,<br />
a trace of rose in cirrus,<br />
a thunderhead on the mountain<br />
before precipitation.<br />
I approached her commissioned 'The Stone Poems', a sequence which attempts to take us beneath the layers of the landscape, with a certain trepidation.I wasn't particularly taken with the first two, 'Rock' and 'Hay', but these are followed by two striking poems: 'Granite' where the granite is described as the 'Milky Way underfoot', 'so small and heavy it can teach you gravity'; and 'Slate', with its Martian-like description, 'a history book, its pages open / for the text of lichens and weather', its colours 'a pigeons throat / of lapping purples, lilacs, greys', all drawing our attention to the fact that pigeons do not deserve such a bad press.From here, however, the sequence gets decidedly heavy unless you've donned your geological hat, as you garb the dictionary to refresh your memory of the Palaeozoic, Silurian, Devonian, etc.One is slightly relieved to resurface and meet a real miner who'd 'ache / at a sudden breath of bluebells brought / by a May wind in the downdraft'.<br />
My mixed feelings about other sequences weren't fully confirmed until I'd worked my way through to her next group of individual poems.'The Middleton Poems' are historically interesting, particularly the accounts of Paxton's effort to develop plumbing and exploit the value of ice.There is a certain sensuous pleasure to be gained in the description of one of his banquets, 'Piled in frozen pyramids, / ice-apples, peaches, mulberries, figs, / glowing jellies, junkets, creams...'But in general I found these sequences, - particularly 'Nine Green Gardens' - driven too much by narrative and research, their descriptions less 'sparky'.Ultimately they lacked what for me are the two most important characteristics of a poem, the ability to be memorable and convey emotion, qualities very much in evidence in the work that follows.<br />
These poems begin quietly and seem diverse, but they ultimately hang together with an Audenesque merging of the personal and public.'Counting Tigers' deals with the individual's experience of night-time insomnia, where the dangerous 'out there' ominously threatens.'Breathing' has a breathtaking (excuse the pun) simplicity in its account of how we learn to smell, but works by providing another of those eureka moments, since we all experience the smell of 'the coats in the hall' but may never have drawn attention to the fact.The poem rounds off in one of those deceptively simple turns of phrase:<br />
Or the new-born that smell like the sea<br />
and the darkness we came from, that gasp<br />
of the drowned in a breaking wave.<br />
As the collection proceeds, an awareness of the outside world, of Iraq and the threat of terrorism, cannot be ignored, and filters subtly through her thoughts - the motif of 'howling' becoming an expression of an universal grief.'Front Page' is a poem for our times; a front page photo of distress is a 'rucksack of sorrow, / on your shoulder, on your mind':<br />
Try leaving it on the platform<br />
To be defused like a suspect package.<br />
Try leaving it on the train,<br />
Personal belongings<br />
They remind you to take.<br />
Try to lose it, bin it, burn it,<br />
Indestructible as the polythene<br />
Of flowers in a filthy stairwell.<br />
Other poems - such as 'On the Train', 'Perfecting the Art', 'The Night War Broke' and 'Tomatoes' - are all memorable in the way they interweave the personal life with the threats that all societies have now to endure.The final title sequence, which covers the Foot and Mouth year of 2001, is in places harrowing to read, since it is still fresh in the mind, though it is not clear how such a sequence will stand up over time.<br />
By the time I came to the end of this collection I was left with two conflicting feelings: initially yes, here is much of the kind of poetry that sets Gillian Clarke apart as a poet, but less (the omission of some of the commissioned poems) might have been more; on the other hand, once I had made it through a hedge backwards, leaving me despondent that nature will never manage to cure all our contemporary ills.Yet just when one is beginning to think this, she manages to pull something out of the bag; one is given a crumb not of hope exactly, more a sense that something endures, as captured in the concluding poem:<br />
FLOOD<br />
When all's said<br />
and done<br />
if civilisation drowns<br />
the last colour to go<br />
will be gold<br />
the light on a glass,<br />
the prow of a gondola,<br />
the name on a rosewood piano<br />
as silence engulfs it,<br />
and first to return<br />
to a waterlogged world,<br />
the rivers slipping out to sea,<br />
the cities steaming,<br />
will be gold,<br />
one dip from Bellini's brush,<br />
feathers of angels,<br />
<i>Cinquecento</i> nativities,<br />
And all that follows.
The open structure allows the Gillian Clarke to include her seven rock poems, written for the National Botanic Garden of Wales; her poems based in archaeology; and her poems about war, and urban violence. There is an instinctive and a deliberate unity of theme and idiom in this book. The poet remains true to her landscapes and her nation. The sequence 'The Physicians of Myddfai', nine sonnets for Aberglasne, and much else is included in this characteristically generous and engaging volume by Wales' best-loved poet.
Windfalls in a bowl.
I see her wake, take an apple
in one hand, a knife in the other.
The apple has fallen from the tree in Eden.
They are mapping the round earth,
discovering geography, astronomy,
She holds the world in her hand...
from 'A Woman Sleeping at a Table, by Vermeer'