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- Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
The poems in Gillian Clarke's Five Fields break new ground. Known as a poet of rural themes and of Wales, in this book she engages with the city in its human and material diversity. Having spent time as Writer in Residence at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, she came into close touch with another kind of music, and with the different spaces it occupies, the different demands it makes on performers and audiences. There are poems from Bosnia, France and the Mediterranean coast, and poems from the landscape we most readily associate with this best-loved of Welsh poets: Wales, its people and its creatures.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
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GILLIAN CLARKE
FIVE FIELDS
For my mother, Gwendolen Ceinwen Evans (1912–1997)
Five fields, five oceans,
seven continents.
So little.
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements are due to the following publications where some of these poems, or versions of them, first appeared: Klaonica,PoemsforBosnia, Bloodaxe; PoetryWales,PicturePoems, edited by Michael and Peter Benton, Hodder & Stoughton; the organ recital programme 1997–1998, the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester; Alchemica, Oriel Mostyn; TheThirdDay, edited by Kathy Miles, Gomer Press; ChristmasinWales, edited by Dewi Roberts, Seren Press. ‘Green Man’ is included in ThirteenWaysofLookingatTonyConran, edited by Nigel Jenkins for the Welsh Union of Writers. ‘The City’ and ‘Concerto’ were commissioned by the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester and first broadcast on Radio 3 in 1997. ‘Ark’ was commissioned by Poetry International, Rotterdam, 1996. ‘Valley’, ‘Into the Mountain’, ‘Layers of Melancholy’, and versions of ‘The Paddle-Steamers’ and ‘Light’ were commissioned by Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno for an exhibition of sculpture. My version of ‘Passus xi’ from AVisionofPiersPlowman by William Langland was commissioned by the Royal Festival Hall, London, for Poetry International.
Special thanks are due to the Arts Council of Wales for a bursary which helped me to write some of these poems, and to the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, for commissioning ‘The City’ and ‘Concerto’ during my residency in May, 1997.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
The Field-Mouse/
Barn/
Shepherds/
Ark/
Flesh/
Neighbour/
A Difficult Birth, Easter 1998/
A Very Cold Lamb/
Rain/
Architect/
The Honey Man/
Phoning Home/
Glass
AttheGlassFactory/
HerTable/
TheHabitofLight/
Shopping/
UndertheStairs/
Migraine/
TheCroquetSet/
Quince/
CutGlass/
Elegy/
Amber/
The White Ship/
The Musical Box/
Legend/
The Lace-Maker/
Women’s Work/
God’s Eye/
Unpacking the Angel/
Snow/
December/
Owl Mythologies
LittleOwls/
BarnOwlsatLeChai/
SeeingAngels/
Valley/
Into the Mountain/
Layers of Melancholy/
European Field/
The Paddle Steamers/
Light/
Hafod/
The City
TheJourney/
TheConcertHall/
VoicingtheOrgan/
TheBomb/
Concerto
Piazza/
Foyer/
Undercroft/
Auditorium/
Horse Goddess/
Balancing/
Sloes/
Green Man/
Estuary/
Lines on First Hearing …/
Letters from Bosnia/
At L’Oursinado/
Magdalene in Provence/
Language Act/
Translation/
The Vision of Piers Plowman, Passus XI: a version/
Also by Gillian Clarke from Carcanet
Copyright
TheField-Mouse
Summer, and the long grass is a snare drum,
The air hums with jets.
Down at the end of the meadow,
far from the radio’s terrible news,
we cut the hay. All afternoon
its wave breaks before the tractor blade.
Over the hedge our neighbour travels his field
in a cloud of lime, drifting our land
with a chance gift of sweetness.
The child comes running through the killed flowers,
his hands a nest of quivering mouse,
its black eyes two sparks burning.
We know it’ll die, and ought to finish it off.
It curls in agony big as itself
and the star goes out in its eye.
Summer in Europe, the fields hurt,
and the children kneel in long grass
staring at what we have crushed.
Before day’s done the field lies bleeding,
the dusk garden inhabited by the saved, voles,
frogs, a nest of mice. The wrong that woke
from a rumour of pain won’t heal,
and we can’t face the newspapers.
All night I dream the children dance in grass,
their bones brittle as mouse-ribs, the air
stammering with gunfire, my neighbour turned
stranger, wounding my land with stones.
Barn
1
Where the wheelbarrow slumps, a lake of rust in its lap,
where rolls of chicken wire loll, caging
a wilderness of nettle and yellowing grass,
where leftover timber rots into cities of woodlice,
you see a barn. Dumpy level, tape, clipboard,
and I’m frozen to the bone. One dawn I’ll be glad of it,
the graphite lines raised to a grid of steel
on the icy sky, roof on, walls firm, and me
in some strawy corner with the black-faced ewe,
the smell of hay, of birth, their private cries
and the first birds singing.
2
In a field of fescue,timothy and Yorkshirefog,
two swallows skim the pond for flies,
rehearsing reflections for the long haul south.
And you up there where the new barn rises,
your hair bleached with summer,
climbing the spaces of your own geometry,
already see light fall through a window
on orderliness: workbench, tools oiled and graded,
the timber stacked in aromatic piles.
You pull me into the sky to see the sea,
the purple mountains of the north. You say,
‘We’ll have a telescope, a barn owl box’.
I see us grow old under the poetry of stars,
