National Poet of Wales
Gillian Clarke
’An impressively achieved and exceptionally rewarding poet.’
Times Literary Supplement
About Gillian’s work
Gillian Clarke is one of the central figures in contemporary Welsh poetry. Her own poems have achieved widespread critical and popular acclaim (her Selected Poems has gone through seven printings and her work is studied by GCSE and A Level students throughout Britain) but she has also made her cultural mark through her inspirational role as a teacher, as editor of the Anglo-Welsh Review from 1975-1984, and as founder and President of Tŷ Newydd Writing Centre.
Born in Cardiff and currently running an organic small-holding in Ceredigion, the Welsh landscape is a shaping force in her work, together with recurrent themes of war, womanhood and the passage of time. Her last three books have all been Poetry Book Society Recommendations.
Clarke’s world is full of the here-and-now - the scratch of stubble at a young girl’s ankles (’Letter from a Far Country’), the slipperiness of a newborn lamb (’A Difficult Birth’), emotion experienced as bodily sensation, "the tight red rope of love" (’Catrin’). However, immediate as the poems are, they are also haunted by many different kinds of past which re-surface in the present like the drowned girl given the kiss of life in ’Cold Knap Lake’.
Sometimes the past is geological, as in ’The Stone Hare’ that’s waited three hundred million years to be chiselled into existence, or belongs to the realm of childhood memory as in ’Legend’ in which the narrator recalls the treacherous ice of a lake in terms of fairy tale, listening to "the Snow Queen’s knuckles crack".
However, it’s the fate of the women of living memory that is most persistent in these poems. In Clarke’s beautiful elegy for her mother, ’The Habit of Light’, domestic routine is celebrated as a kind of sacrament, but elsewhere it’s fiercely contested as a trap, particularly in the sequence ’From a Far Country’ where she imagines the fruits of her ancestors’ "perfect preserves" trapped like faces behind the glass.
From The Poetry Archive - click here to see more
National Poet of Wales
The post of National Poet of Wales was established in May 2005 by Academi – the Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency and Society for Writers. The post is supported by the Arts Council of Wales’ Lottery fund. Gwyneth Lewis was the first National Poet for Wales in 2005, followed by Professor Gwyn Thomas in 2006. Gillian Clarke is the third poet to take up the post. Professor Dai Smith, Chair of the Arts Council of Wales, says: "Gillian Clarke has honed her considerable artistic practice to create, over the years, a body of poetry which deals with the inner essentials of universal human needs and the outer specifics of a distinctive Wales, her take on Wales, which cradles them.The Arts Council of Wales is proud to sponsor this distinguished writer as our third National Poet".
Forthcoming title
At the Source: Prose Writings by Gillian Clarke
Published May 2008, Paperback, £12.95, ISBN: 978 185754 9867
’Source’ is the connecting image in Gillian Clarke’s evocative prose collection, which fuses poetry, memoir and nature writing to subtle effect. From descriptions of lambing and hay making to ruminations on agriculture and ecological destruction, At the Source is a book about living on, with and for the land, and looking out at the world from that particular place.