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In Ice Gillian Clarke turns to the real winters of 2009 and 2010. In their extremity they redefined all the seasons for her. Nature asserted itself and renewed the environment for the imagination. The poem 'Polar' is the poet's point de repère, evoking a polar-bear rug she had as a child and here resurrects in a spirit of personal and ecological longing that becomes a creative act. She lives with the planet, its seasons and creatures, in a joyful, anxious communion. The book also includes the asked for' and commissioned poems, and the Guardian spreads Clarke has written during her time as National Poet of Wales (2008-2013). She follows in the rich millennium-old Welsh tradition of occasional writing going back to the first-known named British poets Aneirin and Taliesin in the sixth century.
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GILLIAN CLARKE
To my cousin John Penri Evans, who took me back to Nant Mill
Acknowledgements are due to the following publications where some of these poems, versions or translations of them, first appeared: the Guardian; Granta; Magma; the New Welsh Review; Roundy House; Taliesin; Touchstone; Love Poet, Carpenter: Michael Longley at Seventy, edited by Robin Robertson (Enitharmon, 2009); Jubilee Lines (Faber, 2012) and Ten Poems for Christmas (Candlestick Press, 2012), both edited by Carol Ann Duffy.
I am grateful to the following for commissioning some of these poems, or where they were first heard: Abergavenny Food Festival; the Bevan Society; Cardiff University for the United Nations International Day of Older Persons; the Commonwealth Observance, Westminster Abbey 2010; LGBT History Week; Literature Wales; Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / the National Library of Wales; the Millennium Centre, Cardiff; Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno; Radio Devon; Radio Wales; the Royal Society of Architects in Wales and the RIBA Council meeting at the Senedd, March 2009; the Senedd / Welsh Assembly; the Smithsonian Festival of Washington DC; Start the Week (BBC Radio 4); the Today programme (BBC Radio 4); Pierre Wassenaar of Stride Treglown Architects and Gwent Archive; Welsh Water / Glâs Cymru.
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Polar
Ice
Advent Concert
Winter
River
Ice Music
Home for Christmas
Snow
White Nights
In the Bleak Midwinter
Hunting the Wren
Carol of the Birds
Freeze 1947
Freeze 2010
New Year
The Dead after the Thaw
Swans
Who Killed the Swan?
The Newport Ship
Eiswein
Thaw
Fluent
Nant Mill
Farmhouse
Taid
In Wern Graveyard
Lambs
The Letter
Grebes
Burnet Moths
Er Gwell, Er Gwaeth
Honesty
Bluebells
Between the Pages
Glâs
Small Blue Butterfly
Mango
Senedd
The Tree
Blue Sky Thinking
A Wind from Africa
Running Away to the Sea – 1955
Pheidippedes’ Daughter
Storm-Snake
Oradour, 10 June 1944
A Glory in Llanberis Pass
Shearwaters on Enlli
White Cattle of Dinefwr
Six Bells
Sarah at Plâs Newydd, Llangollen, 5 July 1788
Pebble
Taliesin
August Hare
Gleision
Osprey
Wild Plums
Harvest Moon
Blue Hydrangeas
In the Reading Room
The Plumber
Listen
The March
Archive
The Book of Aneirin
Lament for Haiti
The Fish Pass
Ode to Winter
The Year’s Midnight
About the Author
Also by Gillian Clarke from Carcanet Press
Copyright
Snowlight and sunlight, the lake glacial.
Too bright to open my eyes
in the dazzle and doze
of a distant January afternoon.
It’s long ago and the house naps in the plush silence
of a house asleep, like absence,
I’m dreaming on the white bear’s shoulder,
paddling the slow hours, my fingers in his fur.
His eyes are glass, each hair a needle of light.
He’s pegged by his claws to the floor like a shirt on the line.
He is a soul. He is what death is. He is transparency,
a loosening floe on the sea.
But I want him alive.
I want him fierce
with belly and breath and growl and beating heart,
I want him dangerous,
I want to follow him over the snows
between the immaculate earth and now,
between the silence and the shot that rang
over the ice at the top of the globe,
when the map of the earth was something we knew by heart,
and they had not shot the bear,
had not loosed the ice,
had not, had not…
Where beech cast off her clothes
frost has got its knives out.
This is the chemistry of ice,
the stitchwork, the embroidery,
the froth and the flummery.
Light joins in. It has a point to make
about haloes and glories,
spectra and reflection.
It reflects on its own miracle,
the first imagined day
when the dark was blown
and there was light.
Landâf Cathedral
First frost, November. World is steel,
a ghost of goose down feathering the air.
In the square, cars idle to their stalls, as cattle
remembering their place in the affair.
Headlamps bloom and die; a hullabaloo
dances on ice to the golden door.
Inside a choir of children sing, startled
at a rising hum over their shoulders
like a wind off the sea, boulders
rolled in the swell as, sweet and low,
Treorchy Male Voice Choir’s basso profundo
whelms them in its flow and undertow,
and hearts hurt with the mystery,
the strange repeated story
of carol, candlelight and choir,
of something wild out there, white
bees of the Mabinogi at the window,
night swirling with a swarm of early snow.
When the white bear came from the north
its paws were roses,
its breath a garland,
its fur splinters of steel.
Where it lapped at the lip of the river,
water held its breath.
Where it trod, trees struck silver,
fields lay immaculate.
The river froze, and broke, and froze,
its heart slowed in its cage,
the moon a stone
in its throat.
The Geminids come and go.
Voyager crosses the far shores of space,
leaving us lonely,
stirred by story.
On the longest night the moon is full,
an answering antiphon
of dark and light.
In winter’s cold eye, a star.
As if on its way to the sea
the river grew heavy,
a knife of pain in its heart,
slowed, slewed to a halt,
words slurred in its mouth
frozen in a dream of death,
came to, foot on the clutch,
engine running.
Struck dumb,
in a curb of ice
stilled in its sleep
under a hail of stars.
Where a river barge cuts upstream
in aching cold the surface cracks.
The drowned stir in their dream
as boat and boatman pass.
The shoals lie low,
silvers of elver, salmon like stones.
The backwash cuts the floe
to spars and bones,
the brimming ribcage
of a drowned beast.