Ice - Gillian Clarke - E-Book

Ice E-Book

Gillian Clarke

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Beschreibung

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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Seitenzahl: 48

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

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GILLIAN CLARKE

Ice

To my cousin John Penri Evans, who took me back to Nant Mill

Acknowledgements

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. 

Contents

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

Polar

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…

Ice

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.

Advent Concert

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.

Winter

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.

River

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.

Ice Music