A Recipe for Water E-Book

Gillian Clarke

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The drop of water on the tongue, writes Gillian Clarke, 'was the first word in the world', and the language of water is the element in which these poems live. Ocean currents create histories and cultures - the port cities of Cardiff and Mumbai; myths are born where great rivers have their source high in the mountains. A bottle of spring water contains the mineral elements of life; we can read the earth's deep history in arctic ice. We share the rhythms of migrations in the pull of tides and seasons through rivers and estuaries. In her first collection since becoming the National Poet of Wales in 2008, Gillian Clarke explores water as memory and meaning, the bearer of stories that well up from a personal and collective past to return us to the language of the imagination in which we first named the world.

Leseprobe

GILLIAN CLARKE

A Recipe for Water

For David

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are due to the following publications where some of these poems, versions or translations of them, first appeared: Planet; The New Welsh Review; Orbis; Touchstone; Taliesin; A470; Magma; Journal of the Academy of Social Studies (June 2008); Welsh and Proud Of It (Pont Books 2007); Poems of Love and Longing (Pont Books 2008); Branch Lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry (ed. Guy Cuthbertson and Lucy Newlyn, Enitharmon 2007). ‘‘Sgwarnog’ and ‘Shepherd’ first appeared in At the Source (Carcanet 2008).

I am grateful to the following for commissioning some of these poems: Ledbury Festival 2005; Bath Festival of Literature, 2008; Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Caerdydd 2008; Green Bay Television; The Verb, BBC Radio 3; Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4; the Royal Society of Architects in Wales; Theatr Arad Goch; the Bevan Foundation; St Fagans Folk Museum; the Royal Commission for Ancient Monuments; Galeri, Caernarfon. Thanks are due to Cardiff City Council and the Academi for my year as Capital Poet in 2005, which prompted the City poems; the Sociology Department of Cardiff University for commissioning poems for the Futures Conference, 2005; Poetry Live and the British Council for the week spent in Mumbai, 2007; the Academi and the Welsh Assembly Government for opportunities and commissions arising from the post of National Poet for Wales.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

First Words

A Pocket Dictionary

Glas y Dorlan

Not

Otter

The Fox and the Girl

‘Sgwarnog

Nettles

A T-Mail to Keats

Fflam

The Ledbury Muse

A Recipe for Water

Severn

A Barge on the Severn

Source

Sabrina

Ice

Tide

Bore

Barrage

Migrations

Mumbai

Man in a Shower

At the Banganga Tank

In the Taj

Laundry

Hands

Post Script

Glacier

Reader’s Digest Atlas of the World

City

Afon Tâf

Architect

Coins

Llandâf Cathedral

Sleepless

Subway

The Rising Tide

Welsh

Stadium

Wing

Number 8

Letting the Light In

House of Dreams

A Sonnet for Nye

Mercury

Welsh Gold

Horsetail

Kites

Death’s Head Hawkmoth Caterpillar

Oradour-sur-Glane

Singer

Storm over Limousin

Landscape with Farm

The Accompanist

Bach at St Davids

Cattle, Hayfield, Storm

Gravity

Wings

Pegging Out

Love at Livebait

Revival

Castell y Bere

Old Libraries

The Oak Wood

Library Chair

Quayside

Farewell Finisterre

December

Cae Delyn

Advent

The Darkest Day

Solstice

Dawn

Shepherd

About the Author

Also by Gillian Clarke from Carcanet Press

Copyright

First Words

The alphabet of a house – air,

breath, the creak of the stair.

Downstairs the grown-ups’ hullabaloo,

or their hush as you fall asleep.

You’re learning the language: the steel slab

of a syllable dropped at the docks; the two-beat word

of the Breaksea lightship; the golden sentence

of a train crossing the viaduct.

Later, at Fforest, all the words are new.

You are your grandmother’s Cariad, not Darling.

Tide and current are llanw, lli.

The waves repeat their ll-ll-ll on sand.

Over the sea the starlings come in paragraphs.

She tells you a tale of a girl and a bird,

reading it off the tide in lines of longhand

that scatter to bits on the shore.

The sea turns its pages, speaking in tongues.

The stories are yours, and you are the story.

And before you know it you’ll know what comes

from air and breath and off the page is all

you’ll want, like the sea’s jewels in your hand,

and the soft mutations of sea washing on sand.

A Pocket Dictionary

‘Geiriadur Llogell Cymraeg a Saesoneg’, 1861

Fifty years. His handwriting, his name, address.

Richards’ Pocket Dictionary. 1861.

My father’s fingerprints. Mine over his.

I look up a word, as I’ve so often done,

without a thought beyond the page, the word.

Now syllables flock like a whirr of redwings

over the field of my mind. Here the world

began, and then is now. I am searching

for definitions, ambiguities, way

down through the strata, topsoil, rubble,

a band of clay, an inch or so of gravel,

for a particular carbon-dated day,

a seepage in the earth, a gleam of meaning,

a sudden uprise of remembering.