Carcanet Press - Collected Poems

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Coming Home

after teaching a poetry course

A week away and I’m coming home.

At five the car breaks dawn in a surf of balsam,

untangles the hill, the lanes, the B-roads.

Stone towns of northern England stir

for the milk and the post.

Bill, his dying wife in his arms a month ago:

Lincolnshire spreads fields of widening gold

about his empty house, sons, daughters,

grandchildren in the sleeping farms,

her shadow cooling in the double bed.

The motorway straightens through the eyes of bridges.

Dawn burns off its gasses over Manchester,

and Sarah’s broken childhood bleeds again,

her father’s love gone sour and retracted to a vice

that turns the safe-house dead, and blind, and mute.

South on the M6, sunrise in my mirror

dazzles with tears the distant border country.

Into Wales, and for once I dare drive fast

where the road steps off between mountains into air,

Glaslyn blue and silk beyond it.

Jane with her love simpler than marriage

and all pain lost in the simple fact of it,

her body a harp now that the wind stirs.

Tracey, half a mind on poetry, half on visions,

still frail as glass from the doctor’s silences.

Home through waking villages, Bala yawns and rises.

Llyn Tegid takes a white sail in its palm.

Anne, after lifelong marriage, keeps house alone,

its rooms about her like his shrugged-off coat,

rehearses in my mind our house, one day.

The lane narrows and turns between sunburnt fields.

Two hundred miles behind me, you at the door

rising for breakfast, a late dream in your eyes.

The slate’s already hot. The bees are in the fuchsia.

A rug of sunlight’s on the bedroom floor, ours

and the widower’s bed spread cool for homecoming.

The Welsh publishing house Gwasg Gomer published Gillian Clarke's first full collection of poems, The Sundial, in 1978. In the twenty years since then the poet has become one of the best-loved and most widely read writers of Wales, well-known for her readings, for her radio work and her workshops.

'Gillian Clarke's poems ring with lucidity and power[...] her work is both personal and archetypal, built out of language as concrete as it is musical,' the Times Literary Supplement said. She combines traditional skills with an original voice and outlook, and with a history which includes the unwritten stories of Welsh women. Her Selected Poems has proven one of the most popular volumes of modern Welsh poetry, having gone through seven printings in a dozen years. 'Her language has a quality both casual and intense, mundane and visionary,' the Listener said of Letter from a Far Country. 'There is no gaudiness in her poetry; instead, the reader is aware of a generosity of spirit which allows the poems' subjects their own unbullied reality.'

Gillian Clarke is a severe critic of her own poems. Collected Poems includes all that she wishes to preserve of her work to date.

from The Sundial
The Sundial

Journey

Snow on the Mountain

Blaen Cwrt

Baby-Sitting

Calf

Nightride

Catrin

Still Life

Storwm Awst

Death of a Young Woman

Swinging

Lunchtime Lecture

Dyddgu Replies to Dafydd

At Ystrad Fflûr

Railway Tracks

Foghorns

Curlew

Burning Nettles

Last Rites

Harvest at Mynachlog

Clywedog

Choughs

St Thomas’s Day

from Letter from a Far Country

White Roses

Return to Login

Miracle on St David’s Day

East Moors

Scything

Jac Codi Baw

Ram

Buzzard

Friesian Bull

Sunday

Taid’s Funeral

Letter from a Far Country

Kingfishers at Condat

Seamstress at St Léon

Les Grottes

Heron at Port Talbot

Suicide on Pentwyn Bridge

Plums

Death of a Cat

Cardiff Elms

Sheila na Gig at Kilpeck

Siege

Lly^r

Blodeuwedd

Shadows in Llanbadarn

The Water-Diviner

from Selected Poems

Syphoning the Spring

A Dream of Horses

October

Climbing Cader Idris

Castell y Bere

Today

Taid’s Grave

Tadzekistan

Shearing

from Letting in the Rumour

At One Thousand Feet

Neighbours

Windmill

Listening for Trains

Storm

Seal

Ichthyosaur

Cold Knap Lake

Apples

Oranges

Fires on Lly^n

Talking of Burnings in Walter Savage Landor’s Smithy

Border

Post Script

Marged

Overheard in County Sligo

Shawl

My Box

Falling

Roadblock

Binary

The Hare

Hare in July

Trophy

The Rothko Room

Red Poppy

February

Gannet

Night Flying

In January

Tory Party Conference, Bournemouth, 1986

Times like These

Slate Mine

Roofing

Hearthstone

Pipistrelle

Fulmarus Glacialis

Racing Pigeon

Magpie in Snow

Tawny Owl

Peregrine Falcon

Clocks

Cofiant

from The King of Britain’s Daughter

Blood

Musician

The Listeners

Anorexic

The Vet

Baltic

Hölderlin in Tubingen

The Poet

Wild Sound

Swimming with Seals

Lurcher

Lament

No Hands

Olwen Takes Her First Steps on the Word Processor in Time of War

Eclipse of the Moon

Advent

The Lighthouse

On Air

Wind Gauge

Grave God

The Angelus

Family House

Stealing Peas

Sunday

Breakers Yard

The Loft

Hay

Beudy

Walking on Water

The West Window of York Minster

St Winefride’s Well

Coming Home

The Wind-Chimes

The King of Britain’s Daughter

Index of titles

Index of first lines

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 ... read more

Awards won by Gillian Clarke Commended, 2024 A Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation
(The Silence) Short-listed, 2022 The Wales Book of the Year
(Roots Home) Long-listed, 2020 The Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry (Zoology) Winner, 2011 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
Winner, 2012 Wilfred Owen Award

Praise for Gillian Clarke 'This is a collection which deserves the readerâs full attention. The poems may at times prove uneasy, they will make us think and maybe demand reading again, and again. But they will remain with us.'

James Caruth, The North
'Clarke's skill lies in using simple language to record moments of great beauty, no less lovely for sometimes being familiar. She reminds us of the comfort to be drawn from paying attention to nature'

Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian

'Rich with repetition and punctuated by potent page breaks, this extraordinarily incisive collection creates space to reflect upon how the pandemic has transformed us and what, in the face of loss and quiet, our hearts have learned.'

Jo Clement, The Poetry Society Bulletin

'The Silence is not concerned only with the pandemic. Gillian Clarke's writing frequently offsets her awareness of the naturalness and depth of her roots in rural Wales with the sense of strangeness which comes from having English as her "mother-tongue". These meditations are delicately handled in the collection, and particularly striking in the context of environmental catastrophe. What now threatens the landscape which Clarke has farmed and nurtured, in life as in verse, are shadows which roll across the globe, turning, for many people, the possibility of belonging anywhere into wishful thinking. The Silence is full of poems which remind us of the importance of place, and the demand of its words and silences to be listened to.'

Carol Rumens, The Guardian Poem of the Week

'There is a numinous quality to this book, a kind of spiritual attention which reveals, by silence and contemplation, the wondrous.'

Stephen Sexton, Irish Times

'This tug between the factual and the more mystical world beyond is at the heart of the collection. Science can describe the Land but not how love of particular places works within the human spirit...a richly varied and substantial collection'

D A Prince, the North

'Clarke has a direct line to the natural world. She paints the Welsh landscape without idealising or romanticising, and in the process shows that nature doesn't need to be elevated to inspire a quiet awe.'
Financial Times Best Books of 2017

'Always openings. Perceptions never alien to the new. No borders enclose her ideas. They are allowed to roam in her meticulous phrasing. And yet her greatest strength is, paradoxically, her moments of both closure and trapped moments of insight delivered to us grateful readers with faithful intelligence.'
Herald Scotland

'Clarke is a singer among poets, a celebrant of landscape, trees, insects, dead ewes, a writer whose rhythms and vocabulary seem tenaciously rooted in the traditions of the place of their origin.'
The Tablet 'Gillian Clarke's outer and inner landscapes are the sources from which her poetry draws its strengths.'
Carol Ann Duffy, Guardian
'Gillian Clarke's [poems] ring with lucidity and power... Clarke's work is both personal and archetypal, built out of language as concrete as it is musical.'
Anne Stevenson, Times Literary Supplement 'In Ice Gillian Clarke explores memory and identity through a series of winter landscapes.'
Adam Newey, The Guardian, 1st December 2012
'Clarke's mellifluous new collection [A Recipe for Water] is her first since her appointment as Wales's national poet in 2008. The drop of water on the tongue, she tells us, 'was the first word in the world', and it's through water that these poems give up their stories: history is written into the Arctic's ice; myths well up from river sources; the currents on the ocean wash culture and heritage onto our shores. Watery collections have poured forth from the pens of poets from Sean O'Brien to Maura Dooley in recent years; anticipation is high for Clarke's contribution to the pool'.
Sarah Crown, the Guardian, 3 January 2009

Gillian Clarke reads 'The Sundial' (1:34 mins) An Evening with Gillian Clarke: Part 1 of 3 - Oswestry Festival of the Word 2012 (38:15 mins) An Evening with Gillian Clarke: Part 2 of 3 - Oswestry Festival of the Word 2012 (28:29 mins) An Evening with Gillian Clarke: Part 3 of 3 (credits) - Oswestry Festival of the Word 2012 (5:25 mins)

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Collected Poems Gillian Clarke 10% off eBook (EPUB) 10% off Paperback Categories: Bestsellers, Welsh, Women Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Aug 2011) 9781847778154 £11.99 £10.79 Paperback (192 pages) (Pub. Nov 1997) 9781857543353 £14.99 £13.49 To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions. Description Excerpt Author Contents Awards Reviews Audio Coming Home after teaching a poetry course A week away and I’m coming home. At five the car breaks dawn in a surf of balsam, untangles the hill, the lanes, the B-roads. Stone towns of northern England stir for the milk and the post. Bill, his dying wife in his arms a month ago: Lincolnshire spreads fields of widening gold about his empty house, sons, daughters, grandchildren in the sleeping farms, her shadow cooling in the double bed. The motorway straightens through the eyes of bridges. Dawn burns off its gasses over Manchester, and Sarah’s broken childhood bleeds again, her father’s love gone sour and retracted to a vice that turns the safe-house dead, and blind, and mute. South on the M6, sunrise in my mirror dazzles with tears the distant border country. Into Wales, and for once I dare drive fast where the road steps off between mountains into air, Glaslyn blue and silk beyond it. Jane with her love simpler than marriage and all pain lost in the simple fact of it, her body a harp now that the wind stirs. Tracey, half a mind on poetry, half on visions, still frail as glass from the doctor’s silences. Home through waking villages, Bala yawns and rises. Llyn Tegid takes a white sail in its palm. Anne, after lifelong marriage, keeps house alone, its rooms about her like his shrugged-off coat, rehearses in my mind our house, one day. The lane narrows and turns between sunburnt fields. Two hundred miles behind me, you at the door rising for breakfast, a late dream in your eyes. The slate’s already hot. The bees are in the fuchsia. A rug of sunlight’s on the bedroom floor, ours and the widower’s bed spread cool for homecoming. The Welsh publishing house Gwasg Gomer published Gillian Clarke's first full collection of poems, The Sundial, in 1978. In the twenty years since then the poet has become one of the best-loved and most widely read writers of Wales, well-known for her readings, for her radio work and her workshops. 'Gillian Clarke's poems ring with lucidity and power[...] her work is both personal and archetypal, built out of language as concrete as it is musical,' the Times Literary Supplement said. She combines traditional skills with an original voice and outlook, and with a history which includes the unwritten stories of Welsh women. Her Selected Poems has proven one of the most popular volumes of modern Welsh poetry, having gone through seven printings in a dozen years. 'Her language has a quality both casual and intense, mundane and visionary,' the Listener said of Letter from a Far Country. 'There is no gaudiness in her poetry; instead, the reader is aware of a generosity of spirit which allows the poems' subjects their own unbullied reality.' Gillian Clarke is a severe critic of her own poems. Collected Poems includes all that she wishes to preserve of her work to date. from *The Sundial* The Sundial Journey Snow on the Mountain Blaen Cwrt Baby-Sitting Calf Nightride Catrin Still Life Storwm Awst Death of a Young Woman Swinging Lunchtime Lecture Dyddgu Replies to Dafydd At Ystrad Fflûr Railway Tracks Foghorns Curlew Burning Nettles Last Rites Harvest at Mynachlog Clywedog Choughs St Thomas’s Day from *Letter from a Far Country* White Roses Return to Login Miracle on St David’s Day East Moors Scything Jac Codi Baw Ram Buzzard Friesian Bull Sunday Taid’s Funeral Letter from a Far Country Kingfishers at Condat Seamstress at St Léon Les Grottes Heron at Port Talbot Suicide on Pentwyn Bridge Plums Death of a Cat Cardiff Elms Sheila na Gig at Kilpeck Siege Lly^r Blodeuwedd Shadows in Llanbadarn The Water-Diviner from *Selected Poems* Syphoning the Spring A Dream of Horses October Climbing Cader Idris Castell y Bere Today Taid’s Grave Tadzekistan Shearing from *Letting in the Rumour* At One Thousand Feet Neighbours Windmill Listening for Trains Storm Seal Ichthyosaur Cold Knap Lake Apples Oranges Fires on Lly^n Talking of Burnings in Walter Savage Landor’s Smithy Border Post Script Marged Overheard in County Sligo Shawl My Box Falling Roadblock Binary The Hare Hare in July Trophy The Rothko Room Red Poppy February Gannet Night Flying In January Tory Party Conference, Bournemouth, 1986 Times like These Slate Mine Roofing Hearthstone Pipistrelle Fulmarus Glacialis Racing Pigeon Magpie in Snow Tawny Owl Peregrine Falcon Clocks Cofiant from *The King of Britain’s Daughter* Blood Musician The Listeners Anorexic The Vet Baltic Hölderlin in Tubingen The Poet Wild Sound Swimming with Seals Lurcher Lament No Hands Olwen Takes Her First Steps on the Word Processor in Time of War Eclipse of the Moon Advent The Lighthouse On Air Wind Gauge Grave God The Angelus Family House Stealing Peas Sunday Breakers Yard The Loft Hay Beudy Walking on Water The West Window of York Minster St Winefride’s Well Coming Home The Wind-Chimes The King of Britain’s Daughter Index of titles Index of first lines 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 ... read more Awards won by Gillian Clarke Commended, 2024 A Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation (The Silence) Short-listed, 2022 The Wales Book of the Year (Roots Home) Long-listed, 2020 The Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry (Zoology) Winner, 2011 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Winner, 2012 Wilfred Owen Award Praise for Gillian Clarke 'This is a collection which deserves the readerâs full attention. The poems may at times prove uneasy, they will make us think and maybe demand reading again, and again. But they will remain with us.' James Caruth, The North 'Clarke's skill lies in using simple language to record moments of great beauty, no less lovely for sometimes being familiar. She reminds us of the comfort to be drawn from paying attention to nature' Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian 'Rich with repetition and punctuated by potent page breaks, this extraordinarily incisive collection creates space to reflect upon how the pandemic has transformed us and what, in the face of loss and quiet, our hearts have learned.' Jo Clement, The Poetry Society Bulletin 'The Silence is not concerned only with the pandemic. Gillian Clarke's writing frequently offsets her awareness of the naturalness and depth of her roots in rural Wales with the sense of strangeness which comes from having English as her "mother-tongue". These meditations are delicately handled in the collection, and particularly striking in the context of environmental catastrophe. What now threatens the landscape which Clarke has farmed and nurtured, in life as in verse, are shadows which roll across the globe, turning, for many people, the possibility of belonging anywhere into wishful thinking. The Silence is full of poems which remind us of the importance of place, and the demand of its words and silences to be listened to.' *Carol Rumens, The Guardian* Poem of the Week** 'There is a numinous quality to this book, a kind of spiritual attention which reveals, by silence and contemplation, the wondrous.' Stephen Sexton, Irish Times 'This tug between the factual and the more mystical world beyond is at the heart of the collection. Science can describe the Land but not how love of particular places works within the human spirit...a richly varied and substantial collection' D A Prince, the North 'Clarke has a direct line to the natural world. She paints the Welsh landscape without idealising or romanticising, and in the process shows that nature doesn't need to be elevated to inspire a quiet awe.' Financial Times Best Books of 2017 'Always openings. Perceptions never alien to the new. No borders enclose her ideas. They are allowed to roam in her meticulous phrasing. And yet her greatest strength is, paradoxically, her moments of both closure and trapped moments of insight delivered to us grateful readers with faithful intelligence.' Herald Scotland 'Clarke is a singer among poets, a celebrant of landscape, trees, insects, dead ewes, a writer whose rhythms and vocabulary seem tenaciously rooted in the traditions of the place of their origin.' The Tablet 'Gillian Clarke's outer and inner landscapes are the sources from which her poetry draws its strengths.' Carol Ann Duffy, Guardian 'Gillian Clarke's [poems] ring with lucidity and power... Clarke's work is both personal and archetypal, built out of language as concrete as it is musical.' Anne Stevenson, Times Literary Supplement 'In Ice Gillian Clarke explores memory and identity through a series of winter landscapes.' *Adam Newey, The Guardian, 1st December 2012* 'Clarke's mellifluous new collection [A Recipe for Water] is her first since her appointment as Wales's national poet in 2008. The drop of water on the tongue, she tells us, 'was the first word in the world', and it's through water that these poems give up their stories: history is written into the Arctic's ice; myths well up from river sources; the currents on the ocean wash culture and heritage onto our shores. Watery collections have poured forth from the pens of poets from Sean O'Brien to Maura Dooley in recent years; anticipation is high for Clarke's contribution to the pool'. Sarah Crown, the Guardian, 3 January 2009 Gillian Clarke reads 'The Sundial' (1:34 mins) An Evening with Gillian Clarke: Part 1 of 3 - Oswestry Festival of the Word 2012 (38:15 mins) An Evening with Gillian Clarke: Part 2 of 3 - Oswestry Festival of the Word 2012 (28:29 mins) An Evening with Gillian Clarke: Part 3 of 3 (credits) - Oswestry Festival of the Word 2012 (5:25 mins)	Share this... Quick Links Carcanet Poetry Carcanet Classics Carcanet Fiction Carcanet Film Lives and Letters PN Review Video Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years! 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